I don't disagree. I have the same personal sentiment. I hate walling
a major portion of our UI off just for the sake of iteration speed.
I've tried backporting the Flex4 compiler items but they didn't really
help. I also can't seem to find a magic bullet in regards to the
compiler. I've patched it myself and our compilation time seems to be
relative spread out between embedded assets, classes, etc.
Scott
On Apr 6, 2009, at 10:25 PM, Josh McDonald wrote:
Personally, I'd think long and hard before doing something like
this. It really depends on how much of the actual "work" is in the
very top layer of frosting, how much work is done in the "meat" of
the AIR app, and what kind of feedback you need to have going
between these layers.
Perhaps you can get the designers to build simpler components
(buttons, window decorations, etc) in Flash using the FCK, and lay
them out with MXML and Builder. If they're building SWCs with the
FCK at least they can expose [Event] metadata and such, which will
make life easier for whoever needs to tie things together in Builder
for the AIR side of things. I'd be very loath to make SWFs part of
my app for anything more complex than image resources. If it
generates Events and exposes an API, I need to interact with it
without regard for its internal timeline, the possibility of memory
leaks caused by loading SWFs (mainly in Player 9), etc.
I agree with them 100% that compile-time is horrible for Builder.
Adobe knows this, and they're working on it. Building from Ant using
MXMLC rather than Builder is apparently faster as-is, and I believe
you can get a signifigant speedup using the compiler from Flex 4 but
building against Flex 3 libraries. This opens you up to "issues" as
Fx4 is still in early development, but most of the changes these
days appear to be happening in Spark and the new MXML stuff, so
building against the old namespace using the Halo components could
be a helper. Also, recently on the FlexShow podcast they interviewed
a guy (sorry, name escapes me) who's been backporting some of the
speedups from Fx4 into Flex 3. They're not part of the official
download, but I believe you can patch the compiler source, recompile
with Java, and reap the benefits of his hard work without the
technical risk inherent in building using the WIP Gumbo toolchain.
Enough ranting and suggestions from me, I think - time to yield the
floor! :)
-Josh
2009/4/7 Scott Delap <scott-li...@richclientsolutions.com>
I have a question for the list. We are currently doing rapid UI
changes to our Air application. Our UI designers that have experience
with Flash have not been happy with the iteration turn around time of
"skinning" our UI's. Complains range from issues with compilation
time to being able to easily preview changes. They have proposed that
we develop our UI's in pure Flash with only Flash level UI controls.
We'd then embed these UI's as swfs in our Flex/Actionscript code. I
can see doing this for some UI components. However, I must admit I'm
very hesitant to implement the entire UI this way since it becomes one
big passive view black box. Would anyone else have pro's or con's to
such an approach?
Scott
--
"Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls. It tolls for
thee."
Josh 'G-Funk' McDonald
- j...@joshmcdonald.info
- http://twitter.com/sophistifunk
- http://flex.joshmcdonald.info/
