I don't remember the history of the Flex name, but I think we were generally looking for something that might not go too far away from Flash. And we were able to come up with a rune we liked :-) AS3 features are really about what was coming in the ES4 specification. We simply gave feedback. Lots of us have Java experience and talked about things we wanted from there (or wanted to do differently than Java). We looked at C# and features that it had that we liked. But really in many respects for the Flex team we made minor suggestions on AS3 as much of it was coming from the larger ECMA working group. Matt
________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of dorkie dork from dorktown Sent: Friday, June 01, 2007 4:31 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [flexcomponents]What background are the Adobe Engineers? how did the name Flex come about? how did you guys decide what features to put in AS3? On 6/1/07, Gordon Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > how did you guys decide to use mxml (xml)? Here's my perspective... About five years ago there was a general feeling that Flash was great for designers but not for developers. Another problem with Flash was that the author-time FLA files that it saves are binary rather than text, which means they don't work wel with other tools, can't be diffed in source code control, can't have changes from multiple developers merged in, etc. So a small team, which I was on, starting building a very simple authoring tool (which never shipped) which was kind of like Flash without the Timeline and which saved its author-time files in XML format. But we didn't consider this file format to be a language you'd write in. This early work was dropped when we realized that what we should really be building was a declarative HTML-like language for producing SWFs. MXML was the result. > how did you decide to use actionscript That was a no-brainer because it was the language that the Flash Player knew how to execute. - Gordon ________________________________ From: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ] On Behalf Of dorkie dork from dorktown Sent: Friday, June 01, 2007 3:01 PM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [flexcomponents]What background are the Adobe Engineers? i would love to have sat in on the discussions when Flex was first conceived. how did you guys decide to use mxml (xml)? how did you decide to use actionscript or at what point did you say we need to rewrite this and then decided what features to add in? On 6/1/07, Gordon Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: I think the team has quite a mix of language backgrounds. My previous experience was mostly in C++ with ancient knowledge of Fortran, Forth, Pascal, and C. - Gordon ________________________________ From: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:flexcompone [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ] On Behalf Of dorkie dork from dorktown Sent: Friday, June 01, 2007 11:25 AM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [flexcomponents]What background are the Adobe Engineers? What are the background languages of the Adobe Flex programmers? I read this article on Oliver Merks blog about how Java is similar to AS3 and the team I work with is all Java developers. http://blog.olivermerk.ca/index.cfm/2007/6/1/Flex-for-Java-Developers <http://blog.olivermerk.ca/index.cfm/2007/6/1/Flex-for-Java-Developers>
