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Archive for July 25, 2007

Flex For Newcomers

July 25, 2007 by g.

A topic came up yesterday on the Cairngorm list from a developer who described themself as a Flex newcomer.  The individual initially expressed frustration stating “I personally find the resources @ Adobe.com atrocious for new comers”.  Now I personally feel the quality of the resources that Adobe has produced for Flex to be pretty darned good.  So I listed them out and asked the original poster to comment on what they might suggest in terms of improvements.  (fyi, the Flex product team privately solicited input on this a couple of months ago.  If you have any suggestions, please post them in the comments here. I will be sure that the product team gets them.)

The newcomer replied “Perhaps I was just frustrated, let me change ‘atrocious’ to ‘overwhelming’ and leave it at that.”  Now overwhelming I can relate too.  And so I wrote the following.  (Note: my original post that includes a FLEX RESOURCES LIST follows below at the end.)

Hi x_eqtd, 

Oh, overwhelming!  Yeah, I am totally with you on that.  ;-) 

Be forewarned, it never stops being overwhelming.  lol.

Just when you think you are beginning to get your mind around the whole Flex thing, Adobe goes and starts adding things like modules, deep linking support, AIR extensions, framework caching and memory profiling (All Flex 3 features outlined here: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_3:Feature_Introductions ).

Welcome to the revolution!  Adobe is innovating around these technologies and new features and improvements are going to continue to come fast and furious.  For instance, by this time next year Flex 3 will have been shipping for 6 months and we will be talking about the new features coming up in Flex 4 and how some of those new features will be leveraging the new functionality in Flash Player 10.  lol.

Back to your original observation about how big an undertaking Flex/AS/Cairngorm are for newcomers.  I see “Intro to Flex” as being more akin to “Intro to Calculus” than being an “Intro to Arithmetic”.  First, you have GUI development with all of intricacies of event driven programming.  Then Flex apps commonly are data driven, including all of the vagaries of network communications.  And then maybe you are actually involved in the back end coding too, creating webervices and doing SQL programming and database design.  Yikes!   With all that we are way, way, way beyond 1+1=2.  ;-)

In closing, one thing I accidentally left off of yesterday’s list of resources is Adobe’s support of Flex developer conferences.  If you might be attending 360Flex.org next month, or AdobeMAX2007.com in October please email me offlist.

Again, happy Flexing!  :-)

Best regards,

g

 

FLEX RESOURCES LIST

Hi x_eqtd,

I am glad to hear that you are rockin’ with Cairngorm and Flex!  :-)

Just curious about your experience that led you to state “I personally find the resources @ Adobe.com atrocious for new comers”.  Can you point out anything in particular that you find/found lacking?  With the Flex 3 release the product teams really want to be sure that they can get the support resources right, from new comers up to advanced.

Following are a few resources that I know can be helpful.

First regarding Cairngorm, are you familiar with http://cairngormdocs.org/ ?  This domain is a reasonably good entry point for the community’s collected information about Cairngorm.  I agree that Adobe has near next to no support for Cairngorm.  Though I may like to see more, I am skeptical that we ever will.  Basically Cairngorm is an open source project with very limited active development.

Now for resources regarding Flex and ActionScript in general, following are resources that I know Adobe is involved in making available.  Were you aware of them and found them deficient?  If so, please share your thoughts on what how how they can be improved or supplemented.  Really, the product team solicits this type of information.

Best regards,

g

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