Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

The last few weeks I’ve been thrown in at the deep end of some Flex development and with a few minutes to kill on a train to London I thought I’d let you know how I’m liking it. I’m not the biggest fan of MacroMedia because for me they were a classic example of why proprietary software sucked. Back in ‘96 I reported replicable Director bug in their XML handling to do with capitalization that they happily informed me would be fixed in the next 6 months (it wasn’t). They made open source look a shade more compelling at the time.

I won’t start with a rant against semi-colons and curly brackets. Although they still irritate me you {kind of get into the habit don’t you?};

I’ve been using the Flex 3 development tool (built on top of Eclipse) which has a passable GUI editor. I prefer the KITCHEN SINK version which has everything in rather than adding the Flex plugins because the layout and tools are totally Flex focussed.

I like the fact that you can debug your code, stepping through each line and watching variables BUT when you do, it isn’t half slow. At this point I’d also like to be able to hide all the “_” variables that aren’t mine.

I really don’t like ActionScript. Having to declare variables just slows you down. So far, the main thing that has slowed me down has been related to coercion, trying to get an XMLList to behave like an ArrayCollection (or whatever). This pickiness reminds me of AppleScript, another pig of a language to coerce.

The application you build is an (m)XML file, that has scripts, controls and other xml expressed objects in it which then gets compiled into Flash files.

So far, my only disappointments are that the documentation NEVER has enough examples, showing how you might do something and that there isn’t a Flex interpreter. At the end of a particularly hard day I fired up python and typed…

import os
dir(os)

… just to feel in control again.

The project I’ve been working on has been taking XML data and turning into lovely charts. I’m really impressed with the charting components because you can add so much extra interactivity and functionality compared to a png file. I’m pretty confident that I could do a ukulele chord component with the skills I’ve learned over the last few weeks.

The next week’s challenges will all be about turning my lovely chart into something that is genuinely accessible… wish me luck.

p.s The wifi on the train to London actually works today (although they’ve just announced on the tannoy that it doesn’t… eh?) but I think this might be because there are no power sockets in the carriages so only people with a full battery can use it.