The Marshall Plan still generally expects a one-to-one association of a SystemManager with an Application. Lots of Flex apps have a central main Application that loads sub-Applications. By default, the main and sub-apps all have to be compiled with the same version of Flex otherwise changes to API signature could cause a verify error.
The Marshall Plan provided ways for a main app and sub-apps to be built on different versions of Flex (as long as the main app was on the newer version than the sub-apps). I don't recall any discussions about creating new instances of Application and adding it to a single SystemManager. The API allows for it, although I'm not sure the lifecycle would. IOW, if you do "systemManager.addChild(new Application()), you might get an exception from some code somewhere. Could Flex be an operating system? I suppose so, but it wouldn't be a very modern one. It would at best be more like Windows 2. A single UI thread, no serious multi-tasking, etc. Flex can certainly be the "world" that everything else appears to live in. I think there are kiosks and other "embedded" apps where the only thing you see on the screen is a Flex app and you can't switch way to other things running on the underlying OS. I think folks call those "immersive experiences". One person even wrote a dashboard for a very expensive luxury yacht in Flex. It caused serious hand-wringing on our team as we worried there might be a GC bug that would cause the app to die. -Alex On 12/8/16, 7:29 AM, "Josh Tynjala" <joshtynj...@gmail.com> wrote: >Some historical context for this behavior: > >https://sourceforge.net/adobe/flexsdk/wiki/Marshall%20Plan/ > >- Josh > >On Dec 8, 2016 7:17 AM, "flex capacitor" <flexcapaci...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Was Flex going to be an operating system at some point? The way it's >>setup >> allows you to load multiple applications into a system manager. Each of >> those applications can be moved and sized. Pop ups appear over all of >>them >> and they each have their own invalidation cycle. Was there ever a plan >>for >> FlexOS? >>
