Your opinions are definitely welcome here, Jason! I'm sorry to hear that you felt otherwise before. That's not good at all, and hopefully we can fix it.
Indeed, the documentation situation is not ideal. Especially when dealing with IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA and Flash Builder where they were targeted at the older Flex SDK and don't have specific knowledge of FlexJS. There are often some hacks involved, and that's frustrating. There's also little incentive for convincing Jetbrains or Adobe to update their IDEs without some real big adoption. That's part of why I started working on an ActionScript extension for Visual Studio Code (and I'm working on MXML support for the next version of the extension too). Something created by the community has a better chance of evolving with FlexJS. I brought up the lack of good getting started docs for the FlexJS components recently, with some specific suggestions that I think would help tremendously for new developers. Personally, I don't really have any experience with the FlexJS components myself because I'm focusing more on integrating the ActionScript language with other things in the JavaScript ecosystem. Hopefully someone who knows the framework better can do it right with a easily discoverable list of available components and snack-sized code snippets for each of them. Those sorts of examples are vital for getting started, and they're sorely missing. Of course, documentation for the components only becomes useful once you get past the project setup, but improvements are needed on all fronts. Thankfully, Chris and Alex spent a lot of time getting the SDK to build more easily with fewer headaches. So many environment variables and things were needed before, and that made it difficult to gain contributors. You should try out the Maven build now, for the easiest experience. Even if you're not a Maven guy, the Ant build was also refactored and requires much less configuration too. - Josh On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 11:49 AM, Jason Taylor <ja...@dedoose.com> wrote: > everytime a FlexJS release comes out, I try to follow the documentation to > get setup in IntelliJ idea, compile some example projects, and fail > miserably every single time. Search for anything on the error both in here > and at large and it dosen't work. On the source side the build chain is > pretty crazy and also have never managed to get that working. > Additionally I'm losing interest in AS3 as it's support for concurrency, > generics, lambdas, expression trees, generics, conditional clauses on > generics, async await, etc are terrible and feels like the language itself > has no interest in moving forward. Personally I don't agree with the > decision to even base FlexJS on AS3. But yeah, when I can download a > FlexJS release, read some documentation on setting it up in IntelliJ Idea, > and it actually works I will start investing more time, but again I'm very > hesitant at this point due to the limitations of the language itself. Dart > + React offers a lot of the some functionality, with much better language > support imho. But every time I mention any of these points my opinion is > completely discredited and thrown out. > > ~ JT > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Christofer Dutz [mailto:christofer.d...@c-ware.de] > Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2016 11:09 PM > To: dev@flex.apache.org > Subject: [Discuss] What's keeping the others from participating? > > Hi guys, > > > I just wanted to take the opportunity to ask you what's keeping you from > participating in any discussions here on the list and on contributing > anything else. > > > Apache Flex currently has the 10th largest committer base in the ASF, but > currently it feels like there is only 4-5 people still active on this > project. Having this in-diversity in discussions is starting to get more > and more tiresome as I almost know the responses which are going to come if > I post something. I think most of the time I could start writing the reply > for the expected response right away so I don't have to do it later. > > > Are we doing something wrong? > > > What's keeping all of you stay silent? > > > Is is: > > - lack of interest? > > - lack of time? > > - that you think this is too much rocket-science? / It's too complicated > to contribute > > - a consumer attitude that you just want to know what others are doing for > you? > > > Apache is all about community, but for me this doesn't feel much like a > community anymore. Sometimes I think we could rename dev@flex.apache.org > to a...@flex.apache.org as he is definitely the most active poster. > Discussing stuff with the project sort of feels more and more like "If I > want to change something, I'll take it to the list and discuss it with Alex > first". It shouldn't be that way. > > > Is is just us 4-5 people and we simply have to live with it, or can we do > anything to get you guys back on board? > > > For the last more-than-a-year I have been working exclusively on trying to > lower the complexity to contribute in order to get more people on board. It > seems that effort was a waste of time. Please prove me wrong. > > > @Alex: I would like to kindly ask you to please refrain from responding > right away and let at least a hand full of others respond first. I would > like to see if this eventually prevents the "someone else is taking care of > it for me" effect. > > > Chris > >
