Thursday, August 16, 2007

Day 3 Afternoon


The afternoon featured two presentations id been getting hints about all week. Do

Doug McCune: Advanced Custom Components
flex.com.mycomponent.isawesome=true
Arriving late to this one was not a good idea. I ended up standing the entire presentation yet still took 3 pages of notes. I'm sure glad this one was on the last day otherwise id be clueless. Basically Doug, the guy with the taxi-driver haricut, is like a coal miner, getting underneath the ground floor and chip, chipping away at Adobe's Flex framework. Making small changes, molding for his app.

Basically his main point is, the flex framework contains 245,883 lines of code. Use it. Don't waste time developing from scratch. Take an existing component thats almost what you need and tweak it.

From my experience, normally these types of developers dont give presentations. They are usually too busy coding and have no desire to speak or share to large crowds. He jumps around a lot, its almost like we are sitting in his work environment just hanging out with him while he tries to solve some flex app...Someone raised a question, "will there be notes posted from this meeting? This is really kind of scattering my thoughts".

So maybe I'm crazy but it all came though to me perfectly.

This presentation quickly began to run itself. Its like a huge brain dump from all the top developers.

Takeways and URLs

  • dougmccune.com/blog/

  • www.tileui.com

  • look at how the base framework code is structured if you are stuck on coding a componenet

  • invalidate property

  • dirty flag? commit properties

  • 3 things u do 99% of the time (createchildrn, measure, updatedisplaylist)

  • Always define events with constructor

  • Deepa: layout manager class good resource

  • Always define metadata (code hints)

  • Sometimes its best to change things from the ground-floor

  • default.css (contains all styles for components)

  • Someone else: use flexmix to initialize methods [mixin]


Doug also showed tons of code, switching from this presentation to eclipse. Look for link to presentation soon.

David Zuckerman (Adobe): Flex Builder Secrets
This was a great presentation going over short-cuts and adding functionality to flex builder. David has been an engineer on the flex builder team from the onset. Lots of nice shortcuts and he showed refactoring which rocks.

takeaways

  • Ctrl-o - outline view

  • Autowrap strings by hitting enter

  • F1 - Context sensitive help

  • Ctrl-shift-j - show all uses of a variables

  • Refactoring - Where is something defined changes it by type, it knows and it works!

  • Ctrl-/ or \ - toggle comment



Overall these last two presenations gave me a good idea of what is possible. and that programming in flex isnt that hard. theres a slow ramp up to get started but then the learning curve is much nicer! And its very nice how you can go and modify everything you need. From flex framework to styles...

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