More Flex : Hero information comes out

Deepa has furnished us with some more Hero related snippets, and they make some interesting reading.

Deepa's posting

The first spec of the Spark Datagrid makes an appearance, which as suspected, was closer to the Halo Datagrid rather than the AdvancedDataGrid. *makes sign to ward off evil*

There's some good reading in the rest of the spec's that have been posted up to the Open SDK site. The size report looks like it might be useful pre-production, and the RSL Enhancements is worth a read just to get more information on how the Flash Player handles loading of RSLs generally.

Other than this, we still need to wait to get a proper nightly build. Deepa's implication is that the impetus for this was on the Player team rather than Flex SDK team to get their stuff done (or maybe I'm reading too much into it ;) ) as Hero is closely tied to the new player features.

Lastly, it looks like Hero is semi-officially Flex 4.5 rather than 5. Rumours as to what will be in 5.0 starting in 3... 2... 1...

Stop using Maven for open source projects... please...

Honestly, just stop it.

Locking us into a particular build system is simply wrong. Say if a particular popular open source project uses Maven and I want to integrate it into a build system based off of ANT? No luck without a stupid amount of work.

Want to find the actual library a project is using so you can root around inside it? Good luck with that.

Compatibility issues between different versions means that I have to wipe my local repository when switching between two large projects (which I do frequently)... How is this saving me time again?

I have no problem bundling a build system with a project (it would be stupid not to) but Maven isn't just a build system, it's a dependency management system as well. If I was frothing at the mouth more, I'd call it a dependency obfuscation system...

Please, please, please... and I'm looking squarely at you Apache. If you must use Maven, include an alternative method of building the project for the rest of us.

Bye Bye Slider, Hello Hero!

So Slider, the mobile version of the Flex framework is dead.

Instead, we are getting Hero, the code name for the new Flex framework. No word as yet whether this is a point release or Flex 5...

Deepa threw a whole load of links into her blog post about it. Most pertinent being...

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Hero
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/mobile/faq.html

Most interesting part of this is finally a major update to the Datagrid! Anyone who's been kicking around from Flex will remember the last go at updating the Datagrid. The horrid AdvancedDataGrid which, and lets be fair to it here, was barely usable...

Once the news gets out in a proper way, I'd imagine the SDK team will be inundated with kitchen sink requests for a new Datagrid.

Which will we get from the Spark Datagrid... A decent replacement or ADG 2.0?

Part 1.1 Setting up the project.

Ok, so first things first we need to set up Flex Builder and ANT. There are many many blogs out there for doing this, so I'll not going to add to the noise. Instead, some handy links.
http://www.mobilefish.com/developer/flex/flex.html
http://www.roseindia.net/flex/flex_builder_ide.shtml
http://www.judahfrangipane.com/blog/?p=193
http://blog.jodybrewster.net/2008/04/09/installing-ant-in-flex-builder-3/

Go Ahead, get all that sorted out. Part 2 will be creating the project and how we are structuring it.

Added to Adobe feeds!

This is a good thing, and means I can actually start producing the tutorials so they will get indexed!

Learning Flex part 0 : Introduction

So here's what we are going to talk about over the next few posts. Each part of the tutorial will come with code snippets and assuming I keep it up, Flex Builder projects showing the code..

I'm also using Flex 3 rather than Flex 4. Rather than joining the cool kids showing off all the cool parts of Flex 4, we are sticking with the corporate standard. There are few organisations willing to take the leap to Flex 4 and Flash Player 10 yet. Until the penetration statistics rise, Flex 3 is where it's at.

So what's the project for this first tutorial? Very simple image viewer. We are going to start with a straight forward image, and add all sorts of cool stuff.

I may split some of the posts up if they get too big while I'm writing them, just so they aren't too overwhelming!

• Part 1 : Setting up the project. Project structure. Setting up and using ANT. Using a Dependency Injection framework.
• Part 2 : Constructing Objects. Always use interfaces. Compose objects as much as possible.
• Part 3 : Testing the objects. Here's why we used interfaces. Using mocks for fun and profit. Using FlexUnit.
• Part 4 : Composition over Inheritance. Adding a Zoom and Pan. Wrong way to do it with inheritance. Right way to do it with behaviours.
• Part 5 : Adding additional controls. Zoom in / Out buttons.

This will be a good introduction to topics I'll revisit later, and provide a good grounding for adding in business logic and server interactions in later tutorials.

Learning Flex well rather than just learning.

There are plenty of blogs, tutorials, sites, books, people standing on soap boxes, and conferences that all want to teach you how to do Flex, but once you try to get beyond something simple, you run out of steam very quickly.

So the next few posts are going to be sequence of good practices which every good enterprise Flex developer needs to know. Soon, you'll be able to mix it with all those snooty Java developers who think their language is the only way to write enterprise apps!