It is my sad duty to report that after many years of reliable service, our beloved uniFLX is dead. For those who may be unfamiliar with uniFLX and FLXml, both were originally developed in 2002 to facilitate easier, more portable use of XML in Flash via a universal XML parsing component (uniFLX.core) and a uniquely serialized application of XML called FLXml.

The uniFLX/FLXml technique was implemented in a variety of projects ranging from enterprise level applications for fortune 500 companies to simple web sites for friends and family. However, recent improvements to the XML/XMLnode Classes have rendered FLXml (serialized XML) unnecessary and the impending release of AS3 and support for E4X may likewise diminish the usefulness of the uniFLX.core which translates XML nodes into corresponding Flash objects. AS3 will, among other things, natively support XPath allowing nodes to be navigated directly as objects (using dot syntax).

This said, there may still be a use for a repurposed uniFLX application. After all, ‘non-native’ XPath has been supported in Flash via third-party Classes for a couple of years. Yet, I have found a continued benefit to using uniFLX. The additional translation layer generates a unified Flash Object Model that is generally more convenient for application development than the often limiting OM defined by the XML schema.

Regardless, I believe there is obvious value in both approaches, so the time has come to rewrite uniFLX to better integrate the benefits of E4X (and likely remove support for legacy FLXml). I will also be looking at ways to merge the recently revitalized Colordat UI with uniFLX.edit, possibly tying this together with Globjects in the form of a Firefox extension - more on this later.

So, uniFLX is dead! - Long live uniFLX!