It was a great first meeting. It's a great venue, and pizza was great. Robin Hilliard gave an excellent talk, as usual, on Flex. He talked more on frameworks than Flex because he felt that any talk on Flex is only part of the Flex story. This is because Flex is primarily an XML based presentation language built on top of AS2. Robin focused specifically on the Caringorn Framework which is the one he currently uses. Robin also demonstrated an application in Flex and Flash pointing that one of the advantages of frameworks the ease in which the business logic can be reused without change. He also, pointed that he was using some 3rd party skinning library to make Flash components look like Flex components.
As to the question of why Flex versus Flash with a framework, he pointed a few things. 1. Flex uses Component Set V3 which is a faster and better implementation of Component Set V2. Robin did say that that advantage could be eroded by Flash Player 8. And it is uncertain if the V3 components will be released as part of Flash. 2. XML Based presentation language, which makes it faster to design and implement the UI. Robin pointed out that there are some organisation are doing something similar in Flash, having the UI described in some language (usually in some XML form) and automatically generating the UI. 3. Binding. Because Flex is a declarative language, the Flex compiler automatically generates the appropriate code for Binding. Binding is where an object automatically gets updated when some other object changes. Yes, you can do binding in the Flash IDE or in AS2, but can be tendious to implement. Robin mentioned that with MTASC compiler, there is the possiblility that someone could develop a preprocessor to automatically generate the binding code. 4. Redirection of web services. This is server based proxying mechanism that gets around the current Flash restriction of only talking to the domain the file was originally loaded from. This last point is probably the only advantage of Flex as a server based tool. The other points could have easily been achieved with a desktop compiler and some automated deployment tool that would be part of the overall Configuration Management Process and tool sets. Next months FlashDev meeting will continue the Framework theme with more discussion on Frameworks. This talk will be designed around the Arp framework. --- You are currently subscribed to fugli as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Aussie Macromedia Developers: http://lists.daemon.com.au/
