Hi, I just got a new FlexJS up and running. It is a first attempt at a dashboard app for Apache Flex. The Flash version is at [1], the HTML version is at [2], the source is at [3]. The source is managed in the flex-examples repo.
[1] http://s.apache.org/ajs [2] http://s.apache.org/Myt [3] http://s.apache.org/rCV Recently, I’ve had a few conversations with potential FlexJS customers where they asked if anybody was using FlexJS in production. If everyone waits for someone else to be first, nobody will be first, so why not us? Using FlexJS to create a production application would not only force us to find bugs and missing features and stabilize the code, it will serve as that first testimonial. Sure, we have examples in the release, but I want to create something those of us involved in the project and those learning about the project find useful. At a few companies I’ve worked for, this is known as ‘eating your own dog food’ or ‘the dog food principle’. If you don’t know what its like to be a customer, you may not create the right product. On Apache-wide mailing lists, I’ve occasionally seen threads about how GitHub is easier to work with because it is more centralized. For example, see the Apache Flex SDK GitHub mirror [4], or even better, a GitHub project that isn’t a mirror like Google Closure Library [5]. Everything you need is right there on that page or a click away. Compare that to Apache projects where you have to go to another domain and UI for bugs and yet another domain for releases. Flex/FlexJS should be the right technology to create a more centralized experience for Apache projects. Now I’m not a designer by any means so I am definitely looking for others to help design and build out this dashboard. BTW, there appears to be a couple of bumps in the road right now. I don’t think Apache lets us run server-side code on flex.a.o, and Apache doesn’t seem to support cross-domain access from other subdomains within a.o. If you’ve hit the links below you may have noticed that this dashboard is currently running on builds.a.o, because to get around these limitations, I am using Jenkins sort of like a proxy server. When the build runs daily, it fetches new information and stores it locally to the app. Anyway, I’d like to get ideas on what else we could add to this dashboard. My next task is to data-mine the number of committers and PMC members we have, and then try to get number of mailing list subscribers. But what else? A graph of commit activity? A map of where the committers live? A carousel of images of the committers? Of course, I am looking for volunteers to implement these ideas. And meanwhile, I am going to see if other Apache projects are interested. You can see that it is mostly buttons right now that launch other browser windows, but if we get really ambitious, and we can get a cross-domain access or a proxy server, instead of jumping out to JIRA, we’d write a search UI in Flex. Ideally, you would never jump out of Flex, you could participate in mailing list discussions and start your release downloads from within this app. Thoughts? -Alex [4] https://github.com/apache/flex-sdk [5] https://github.com/google/closure-library
