Hey Folks – Just a quick announcement that I, along with members of the Flash Catalyst and AIR teams, will be presenting at the Silicon Valley Flex User Group meetings on Tuesday and Thursday of this week. Tuesday’s meeting is at Adobe San Jose and Thursday’s meeting is at Adobe San Francisco. More details can be found here.
I’ll be reviewing announcements and items of interest from MAX, including:
- Flex Hero updates for mobile & desktop development (and demos!)
- Flash Builder Burrito updates (and demos)
- Falcon (code-name for the next generation compiler project)
- Updates on Flex open source efforts
Hope to see some familiar faces there. Holla!
Hi Deepa,
Thanks for the talk yesterday — it was great. I am a long-time Java developer. I discovered Flex a few months ago, and the more I use it the more I like it. There is one thing that bothers me though: it’s the inclusion of ActionScript code inside MXML files. This JSP-like concept is against the good practices of separating logic from presentation. A half of a typical MXML file is ActionScript. Flex Builder promotes this mixture by automatically generating event handlers inside MXML.
I’d like to be able to generate MXML files exclusively in Design mode and have event handlers generated in the corresponding ActionScript file. Also, I’d like to be able to make a Flex application without using MXML at all.
I have one more question: is Adobe working on new a chart library for Spark? MX charts are not flexible enough.
Hi Alexander –
Plenty of people use code-behind practices where they package all of their AS code in separate AS classes which are included (via a ) tag or by putting all their AS into a library project which is linked to their main Flex project.
Secondly, you can definitely create a Flex app without using MXML. MXML is essentially a wrapper around AS – every MXML file generates an AS class (you can see that by using the -keep-generated-AS parameter with the MXML compiler which will dump out all the generated AS). As long as you import in the right Flex framework classes, you can construct a Flex application purely in MXML except for the fact that the top-level tag must be an tag as that takes care of very important things like initializing the SystemManager.
Regarding charts – we are not moving the MX charts to Spark in the Hero timeframe.
Cheers,
ds
Hello there, This might be a bit late but allow me to introduce myself. I m Alain Ekambi, sofwate ingeneer currentlybased in munich and author of the library located at http://code.google.com/p/gwt4air/. The library is basically about providing a Java API o different flash libraries. First started with AIR i m also adding support for FLEX. A demo can be fouded here: http://www.gwt4air.appspot.com/. This is a Flexapplication entirely written in Java. No MXML, No ActionSCript. I would love to have any inputs about this approach.
Regards,
Alain