July 03, 2008
Suggested Projects related to Flex
In my role as a PM I see lots of feature requests and suggestions that we should do "X" as part of Flex. Unfortunately we can't do everything, and in fact don't necessarily have the expertise in-house to do many of these features. But we do have a great community of passionate folks who sometimes do know about related technologies and are interested in making a difference. Projects like Cairngorm, PureMVC, Mate, FlexLib, FlexUnit, and more recently FlexCover etc were not started by the Flex team, or even Adobe (Cairngorm was done by iteration::two before we bought them).
I've gone ahead and created a page on our open source site with some suggested projects that I'd love the community to work on. Things that we'd probably do if we had all the time in the world and infinite resources, but that we probably won't get to in the Flex 4 time frame. Many of these are based on conversations I've had with folks, where they'd even be willing to participate. So if you see a project you'd be willing to lead, please please please speak up!
You can also of course suggest more projects and I can add them to the page. If you know of a project that we should be promoting because it addresses some of these already (or it should just be promoted in general) we can put it on the related projects page.
Posted by mchotin at 02:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
June 25, 2008
MAX North America Experience Now Live!
Our MAX site is the coolest I've seen yet! You can start learning about the sessions as well as go through a crazy experience here.
Posted by mchotin at 10:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 17, 2008
AIR Cookbook now in beta
The Flex Cookbook is a great way to learn how to do specific tasks in Flex and is growing every day. Now we have the AIR Cookbook to go along with it. Learn how to accomplish things using both Flex and HTML to best leverage AIR. And once again, contributions to the online cookbook will be considered for inclusion in the upcoming O'Reilly printed edition as well!
Posted by mchotin at 09:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 16, 2008
Flex Compiler Design Document Now Available
A few months ago Paul Reilly, one of the engineers on the Flex team undertook the overwhelming task of going through the MXML compiler in detail to document its design for others who might end up working on it. I've now posted that document to the open source site, you can view it here.
So now you have a starting point for all the cool compiler extensions you might want to contribute!
Posted by mchotin at 11:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 09, 2008
Upcoming Flex 3.1 Feature: Marshall Plan
I'm sure based on the activity you've seen in the Flex 3 branch you'd think not much is going on, however you'd actually be wrong. Alex has been leading an effort on a feature we call the Marshall Plan. This is a play on words but is meant to solve a problem that we think folks building big pieces of software may face: the fact that sometimes you can't recompile everything to be on the most recent version of Flex. Additionally it is meant to solve a common use-case we hear about with AIR apps especially, the desire to act as a portal where SWF content can be loaded from multiple domains.
You can learn more about this in abundant detail over on the Marshall Plan Spec page. And if you want, Alex will be presenting on this very topic at 360Flex in August!
ETA: I forgot, I've done some small updates on the Flex 3 page to reflect upcoming dates.
Posted by mchotin at 09:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 02, 2008
Flex 3 Cookbook Cookoff
The Flex Cookbook is a great resource for those who need to learn how to accomplish specific tasks. In fact, it's such a great resource that some of its recipes were contributed into the official O'Reilly Flex 3 Cookbook!
Now O'Reilly is hosting a contest for the best newly submitted recipes. Check out the details over on InsideRIA!
Posted by mchotin at 05:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Acrobat.com announced today
I'm very excited about Acrobat.com now that it has officially launched. I use Buzzword all the time as we put articles for the Dev Center on there which I need to write or review. And ConnectNow is fantastic as a web conferencing solution, everyone should be using it.
And of course much of this is built with Flex, so I can't help but take some pride in seeing our framework used to build such an ambitious set of products. The lessons we learn from the Acrobat.com development teams go back into the product which benefits everyone.
Make sure to check things out and stay tuned over time as we add even more!
Posted by mchotin at 04:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
May 21, 2008
Create Flash Player 10 (Astro) content with the Flex SDK
I'll write this up now since I was on vacation last week.
As you probably know, last week we released the beta of Flash Player 10, code named Astro. While we're waiting for Flex 4 to take full advantage of Player 10, we wanted to make sure that developers had some options to try out the new features. Therefore we have a nightly build of the SDK that can output to run in Player 10.
The following pages should be useful:
Lee Brimelow's video showing what to do
Flex SDK instructions
FP10 ASDoc
Note that the best resource is still the page on Labs since as more demos come online we'll link them there.
Also, Flex Builder code hinting will not work for some of the new properties on existing classes (new classes should be OK). We're going to figure out the right way to solve this and it will obviously work in Flex Builder 4, but we're not sure if we'll address it in a Flex Builder 3 patch.
Posted by mchotin at 10:35 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
April 09, 2008
Flex and AIR books abound!
One of the benefits of being a public-facing Flex team member is that publishers and authors send me copies of their books. It's pretty cool how many Flex and AIR related books have been coming out recently. To name a few delivered to me recently:
Beginning AIR by Rich Tretola
Flex 3 Training from the Source by Jeff Tapper, Michael Labriola, Matt Boles, and James Talbot
Flex Solutions by Marco Casario
Publishers like O'Reilly, Friends of Ed, and WROX are really stepping up and it's great to see. You can see a comprehensive list of Flex books over at flex.org. But make sure to check out your favorite bookseller directly since there are a ton on AIR coming out as well!
Posted by mchotin at 04:14 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)
April 07, 2008
More testing support for Flex from Borland
The number of vendors supporting Flex for testing continues to grow. Borland today is releasing SilkTest 2008 which can perform functional testing for Flex apps and SilkPerformer 2008 which can do load testing with AMF.
Good news for everyone!
Posted by mchotin at 09:07 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
