Yes, I agree, and I certainly agree that a command queue would be a great feature, especially for testing and debugging. I was really just trying to make the case that it was worth the space to discuss it and got a bit overly strident about that.
I also think that the design and prototyping issue is just such an important one that we should approach it in as may different directions as we can think of and have the energy for. I'm encouraged with the FDT effort and some of these other efforts as well. Personally what I'm most interested in is a runtime design tool like an advanced version of the old flex style explorer where basically you have your flex app in one tab or browser instance and your design tool in another tab or browser instance that looks for Id's and skin declarations to put in a tree that allow you to select them and map their properties dynamically to a hierarchy of css classes that you organize in the skinning view. But the main point is that we need to attack this issue from as many different directions as possible. Just by being able to examine the design view and seeing for ourselves what the problems and prospects are will inform us better as to what direction to go in. It's not a question of "is design view the way to go" it's "what's the process by which we discover the way in which to go". Folk are interested in the issue itself very deeply. Enough that I think we can guarantee that folk will try it. In the end if we experiment with all the different directions enough, we'll get the best results from the darwinian process of open source where good ideas will get cannibalized by each other until a good solution appears from the process. Anyway thanks for listening. And thanks for looking into this. On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 8:31 PM, Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com> wrote: > > > > On 2/23/12 4:09 PM, "Scott Delamater" <scott.delama...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> > >> I challenge all readers here > >> > >> Tell me a single feature that Flex needs more than a good designing and > >> prototyping tool. > > > > ... > > Personally I'd prioritize and contribute to any of those long before I'd > > devote time to a WYSIWYG tool. > > > The great thing about Apache Flex is that we don't really have to agree on > prioritization. If you have time to work on something, you do it. > > DesignView is a bunch of stuff (Java, SWF, player). Again, because of the > overhead of donation, I wouldn't hold my breath because I think those > engineers are busy on some tight schedules as well. > > We can look into donating it (and other plugins), but I still think > DesignView needs a serious upgrade as it is currently high maintenance. It > is tied to an SDK version and therefore needs upgrading with each release > (and we're going to release way more often at Apache) and doesn't support > components from different versions. > > There might be some useful stuff to re-use from what would get donated, but > the key piece is probably just how to get the SWF to play within Eclipse. > The other key pieces (how to show properties to edit, for example) deserve > a > re-think. > > -- > Alex Harui > Flex SDK Team > Adobe Systems, Inc. > http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui > >
