Well folks, the first drop of the Apache Flex SDK is now in the whiteboard, it’s your job to build it and test in your applications/IDEs. Lets see if anything broke so we can get a first release out sooner than later.
SVN commit r1234192
This will be the commit that has established Apache Flex as a community first framework. Carol managed to commit the framework to the whiteboard/frameworks folder in SVN without SVN with history for now.
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/flex/whiteboard/frameworks
The framework does not have the compiler, mustella test suite and automation yet. These modules have yet to pass through Adobe legal and will be contributed later.
JIRA issue migration is the other important factor that is still being worked on as well.
Logo contest
The logo contest is at it’s final day of voting so if you haven’t voted yet, get on the list and submit your vote.
More information for the rules of voting here;
http://markmail.org/message/zfr64u4guwvlumcc
Button.buttonMode = true
Once the source was committed, Omar suggested a first commit and that had to do with the spark Button’s buttonMode property set to true.
This then started a conversation about being careful about version compatibility and breaking someones app or altering the expected user experience.
Alex then suggested creating a style for that change. This way, you keep the default backwards compatibility and also allow developers to use this hand, pointer custom cursor setup in a style theme.
As the conversation proceeded with community members chiming in, it was also noted that on top of the style you could then customize the cursor with Embed or ClassReference.
s|Button
{
cursor: ClassReference("com.project.CustomCursor");
}
OR
s|Button
{
cursor: hand;
}
I’m just using this first example as proof of the power in community decisions and brainstorming. Whether this change is committed is up to the community but, one thing is for sure, “It’s up to the community!“.
Faster GroupingCollection
Ryan Frishberg added a refactoring to the GroupingCollection2 in his whiteboard. He says that it’s 1.5-2x faster than GroupingCollection2 and using summary rows tends to be around 50x faster GroupingCollection2.
If community members are interested, he said we could talk about adding it to the main framework once testing is up and running.
Source; http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/flex/whiteboard/frishy/FastGroupingCollection/
Apache Flex SDK versioning
The sdk versioning is something that is going to need to be figured out and there are really two options.
- Keep using the old Adobe 4.x tradition
- Break from Adobe and call it Apache Flex 2012.x
The last option uses the year as the main version number and also establishes a pseudo version 1.0 for Apache Flex. This option was suggested by Alex and I will quote him;
I just got confirmation that FlashBuilder will not be using years, so my proposal is that Apache Flex uses years. The first release, even if it is just approximate parity with Adobe Flex 4.6 would be called “Apache Flex 2012″. Any other release cut this year would be a point release (“Apache Flex 2012.1
Your duty as an Apache Flex community member
Dear development community, this is the best way to get involved in the Apache Flex project right now, build it!
I haven’t actually done this yet but, you can best bet I will have a visual guide up sooner than later showing people how to do it.
For now, there is the all powerful README.txt in the root of the frameworks folder.
See; http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/flex/whiteboard/frameworks/README.txt
For now, it will take some one that has some experience building with ANT to get it going. I have on my list of todos to create a visual tutorial to help other community members get on their feet and build with ANT using the README.txt instructions.
The more community members we can get to build this and report back to the flex-dev list about problems, the faster we can get Apache Flex up on it’s feet and get that first release out to show our supporters how solid our development community is.
Conclusion
I have to admit I was surprised to see the code. That was a great surprise though! Now the adventure begins and we can work together to get Apache Flex stable, setup and release Apache Flex 2012!
Thanks for reading,
Mike
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