Teoti Graphix, LLC

Logo Contest

The Apache Flex logo contest has begun! The contest will end on 01-17-2012.

On the 31th of December, 2011, the Apache Software Foundation has accepted the Flex SDK into incubation. Apache Flex is now a community project managed by Apache (ASF). The migration from Adobe to Apache involves a re-branding and you can contribute by proposing the new Apache Flex logo.

See the logo contest’s rules and details http://incubator.apache.org/flex/logo-contest.html

You can use the Twitter hashtags of #flexlogo or #ApacheFlex directed at @ApacheFlex as well pointing to your logo url and assets.

Whiteboard

The Apache Flex’s whiteboard area;

The whiteboard is for experimental stuff – anything that one or several committers want to work on and make visible to others.

Between the committers it has been brought up that there are two possible strategies for organizing the code that gets committed there.

One; separate all root folders into committer name like I have done with /trunk/whiteboard/mschmalle/mobile-popups.

Two; separate the root folders into functionality and then say committer name.

My opinion as a committer is that we should just use our names as the root, keep a README file in the root of our folder to allow anybody curious the ability to see what is going on at a glance.

Maybe root level directories can be voted on as a group so that only things that will have a shelf life end up at the bottom most visible folder.

I just donated a mini PopUp framework to the whiteboard yesterday, this is also why the conversation came up, seems like the Apache Way of just do it is good because it allows things to surface and get resolved.

You can see the code here; http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/flex/whiteboard/mschmalle/mobile-popups/

SDK’s future

Quotes are from Alex Harui.

Carlos Rovira brought up some questions;

Dynamic View States

Capability to create states on the fly and let other code handle the transitions, etc. of these states.

Adobe has some work in this area that will likely get contributed.

AOP

AOP is probably a language thing, which we do not have control of. As soon
as you start bytecode manipulation, you are no longer programming in
ActionScript and prone to even more debugging and analysis issues than folks
who used to mix C and Assembly. I would first want to see why a better
composition model for features can’t do pretty much everything you’d want to
do in AOP.

Flex Core refactor (SystemManager, Managers -PopUpManager,…-)

My whiteboard folder will eventually include a completely new framework based that will be mostly backward compatible with Flex but will have smaller base-classes, a minimal DI implementation, and not use AS features that are hard to cross-compile to JS.

Maven support

It is the #1 vote on JIRA. Just need someone to start working on it.

Metada Evolution and DI frameworks support

I’m very much against the use of metadata at runtime. It is a whole other language that is not first-class in the VM and probably will never be, and currently does not have any ties to ActionScript. The kinds of DI used at the application framework level by Parsely and Swiz don’t need to be tied to the same DI in the framework and probably shouldn’t be for performance reasons. It is different to inject a large application model once vs injecting a data model for every component. Now if we find a good DI implementation for the framework layer, application frameworks may decide to borrow or extend it, and I’m pretty sure the framework DI will not be parsing metadata at runtime.

IRC Channel

Michel Boudreau commented that he runs the #flex channel on freenode.net. He was asking if community members wanted to make it the official channel for Apache Flex.

Bertrand commented that IRC is fine for water cooler talk but anything that involves decisions or direction needs to be discussed on the flex-dev@apache.org list.

Conclusion

Usually I do not directly quote Alex as much as I did above but, he gives such concise answers to questions that I could not resist on the items listed.

On the new framework that Alex is talking about, I asked him this;

Alex, can you say what your framework classes are based on? Is this something where mobile and multi-touch can be used/composed but the framework not dependent on them?

His answer;

My current thoughts are to create a framework that is very granular and uses lots of composition. I have prototypes where HelloWorld is a 28K swf.

I’ll leave you with that wonderful future vision.

Thanks for reading,
Mike