Hi Piotr,

Many thanks for your help.

We are not interested *at all* in SWF compatibility or alignment between a SWF 
and a JS version.
Our goal is to migrate our browser-based applications catalog out of Flash 
player. We will keep AIR apps (desktop/mobile) under the Flex/AIR hood. Common 
libraries (which usually do not have any UI) will be upgraded to mixed-mode 
when necessary (and if possible ! If not possible - or too complicated - we 
will have two versions, of for SWF, and one for JS).

So maybe our best bet is to work on the integration of existing JS-only UI 
components... (MDL, jQuery etc.)

It would be nice if we had some clues about which JS UI library (or libraries) 
would be the closest to Flex-SWF components in terms of functionalities.

(we would not like to have to pick from half a dozen different libraries ! We 
like things simple and powerful !).

We found Sensha UI libraries very nice, but wayyyy too expensive (but we do not 
mind paying a reasonable license price).

We develop only enterprise management software (no games, no "personal" 
utilities) and the components that we use the most are Datagrid, 
HierarchicalDatagrid (very important), Forms (FormItem etc.), Validators (and 
custom validators), DropdownList... I will not enumerate all of them but you 
understand our needs... Localization is also very important to us 
(ResourceManager) and also quick and flexible layout management (but we never 
use "custom" layouts).
On the other hand, visual skinning is not the most important thing. In our 
world, the most important thing is reliability, performance, and ease of use. 
Cosmetics comes at the bottom of our wishlist (even if it is somehow related to 
ease of use).

Another problem we face (for custom components) is dealing with composition vs 
inheritance.
The concept is *intellectually* cleaner. No doubt about this.
But for the conceptors/implementors, what was initially very simple (find the 
closest existing component, extend it, override what you need to, add missing 
parts) suddenly becomes very very complicated because you have to guess what 
are the existing parts you should assemble (compose) among the hundreds of 
existing parts...(some of them already composed...!). In the "classic" Flex 
world, component compositing was used for...composed components ! (components 
with multiple functional "areas")  Not for standalone components.
We feel like a contractor building a house, who needs to install and tweak a 
faucet, and instead of having to choose between four "kind" of faucets we 
suddenly have to imagine and assemble a never-seen-before faucet by choosing 
between all possible kinds of pipes, all possible kinds of rubber, all possible 
kinds of metal, all possible kinds of knobs...

I would like to say that our job is not to *build* tools but to *choose* tools 
in order to build usable software solutions. We are "house contractors", not 
"faucet contractors". We need a "faucet catalog" (UI library) with well defined 
characteristics. If necessary, we can slightly tweak it (custom item renderer 
is the most common need).

Meanwhile, we are also testing ReactJS (although not a real framework but, 
again, our main issue is the UI part) and I must say that documentation, 
samples, contribution and community activity is very impressive...(not event 
talking about robustness and performance). At some point, rewriting our 
business logic in TypeScript (yes, we are testing with TypeScript because we 
want to stick to strongly typed code, classes...etc... and it works 
surprisingly well) might prove more reliable, and not necessary more 
expensive... I personally prefers AS3 over TypeScript (easier to read, no 
"fancy" syntax, cleaner handling of "this"...) but TS is not bad at all.

But we are going on in our tests and give a try to MDL (or another) + flexJS.

Best regards,

Nicolas Granon




> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : Piotr Zarzycki [mailto:[email protected]]
> Envoyé : jeudi 28 septembre 2017 19:08
> À : [email protected]
> Objet : Re: [FlexJS] Guidelines for implementation of layout containers
> and navigation containers
> 
> Hi Nicolas,
> 
> I believe my answer will only partially satisfy you. About containers
> exists in FlexJS (Royale) you can read more here [1]. I would strongly
> suggest look first on our examples [2]. We do not have ViewStack
> container, so I believe that is something which can be implemented and
> maybe pushed to our repository. We definitely suffer for a lack of
> documentation, when I was started to dig into the framework I simply
> look into how actually each component is implemented [3] - architecture
> is pretty clean in my opinion and more composition oriented than
> inheritance. Quite helpful can be this website [4] - That is the slight
> description about our main principle PAYG.
> 
> As for the components itself there are module Basic [3] which contains
> our native components which should look same in SWF and JS, but as you
> probably know it is not fully true and not necessary should be.
> 
> There is also module MDL [5][6][7][8] which is wrapper around existing
> components + some implementation of some additional things like
> "dataProvider" in List. Encourage you to look into the code of
> components as I suggested it for Basic. This module do not have SWF
> representation - it is simply compile to JS only.
> 
>  I hope we will be better and better with documentation and some day
> new users will not have to dig into the code. I can say also from my
> experience that once you will figure out how everything is working
> productivity is quite good.
> 
> [1]
> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLEX/FlexJS+Container+Class
> es+and+Layouts
> [2] https://github.com/apache/royale-asjs/tree/develop/examples/flexjs
> [3]
> https://github.com/apache/royale-
> asjs/tree/develop/frameworks/projects/Basic/src/main/flex/org/apache/fl
> ex/html
> [4]
> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=710130
> 28
> [5]
> https://github.com/apache/royale-
> asjs/tree/develop/frameworks/projects/MaterialDesignLite/src/main/flex/
> org/apache/flex/mdl
> [6]
> https://github.com/apache/royale-
> asjs/tree/develop/examples/flexjs/MDLExample
> [7] https://getmdl.io/components/index.html
> [8]
> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLEX/Table+Of+Components
> 
> Thanks, Piotr
> 
> 
> 2017-09-28 17:58 GMT+02:00 Idylog - Nicolas Granon
> <[email protected]>:
> 
> > We need to « re-implement » a ViewStack container component class for
> > use in a FlexJS (test) project.
> >
> > Is there a general walkthrough explaining (in details) the principles
> > when creating a container component for FlexJS (we are mostly
> > interested in the js output, not SWF).
> >
> > We have read the docs at
> > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLEX/Creating+Components
> > but it is rather control-oriented  (textInput, Slider…).
> >
> > We also plan to have TabNavigator etc. but I believe that we can
> > recreate a ViewStack container, creating other containers won’t be so
> difficult.
> >
> > Also, is there some document around explaining how to implement
> layout
> > containers ? (as opposed to navigation containers).
> >
> > Or maybe we do not have the correct approach and reimplementing MX
> > components does not fit in the “FlexJS” philosophy ?
> >
> > Many thanks in advance
> >
> > Nicolas Granon
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> 
> 
> --
> 
> Piotr Zarzycki
> 
> mobile: +48 880 859 557
> skype: zarzycki10
> 
> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/piotrzarzycki
> <https://pl.linkedin.com/in/piotr-zarzycki-92a53552>
> 
> GitHub: https://github.com/piotrzarzycki21

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