[osflash] Free flex 2 beta 3 (following Important questions for future robust web-applicationsdevelopment)

[João Saleiro]

Thanks for your answer David, i know that currently the beta 3 is a public version, but I don’t have time to try it until I finish my graduation. My question is… completely free? That means that I can produce and deploy a complete RIA (like, for example, www.castingoffice.net osflash/test) without the money I currently don’t have? And when Flex 2 is final, will everything be kept free? I am sorry for my insistence, it’s that it’s not easy when you don’t have money in a country like Portugal, and you want to evolve but doing it in the right way K   Thanks,   João     From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Mendels Sent: segunda-feira, 5 de Junho de 2006 11:32 To: Open Source Flash Mailing List Subject: Re: [osflash] Important questions for future robust web-applicationsdevelopment   Hello,   You wrote:"I know almost nothing about Flex 2. But I know it involves money. A lot of money… And money is something I don’t have, faculty has sucked my and my parent’s pockets till the last drop!. Do you think that the investment that needs to be made to acquire, learn, develop, and deploy Flex 2 applications is justified? What’s the cheapest way to start developing and deploying AS3 applications (in a legal way, of course! :o) )? "   Actually, the Flex 2 SDK is free.  Download it and start building applications now, with no charge at all: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs#flexsdk2   -David Adobe   From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of João Saleiro Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 12:15 AM To: 'Open Source Flash Mailing List' Subject: [osflash] Important questions for future robust web-applicationsdevelopment Hello,   WARNING: Big mail, bad English.   0.       Introduction 1.       Licensing 2.       UML <-> Actionscript Code 3.       ASWing and XML (or visual creation of forms) 4.       The future with Actionscript 3 5.       Server side language 6.       Server side 2-tier development and design patterns justified on PHP? 7.       XML Driven Databases 8.       MovieClipLoader sucks         0.       Introduction ----------------------------------------------------------------- This is new... a mail with an index! :P  When I’ve finished writing this, and realized it’s size, I was in doubt if I should send one mail for each subject, or create an index. The second was chosen… I hope you have courage to read the full mail, I am sorry for such a big mail. If you prefer I can send one mail for each subject . I’m insisting on sending this, because some of my questions are for sure delicate matters to some other people too :o)   So, after two months working on the prototype of the application I’ve referred on my previous mail (www.castingoffice.net u: osflash p: test),  a lot of conclusions are to be taken, and questions to be made.   Most of these questions are concerning the development of big and robust web applications. I think that it is time to try to bring desktop applications to the web (yes, I’m a bit late :P), and actionscript seems to be the present best (but not perfect) language to achieve it, with it’s limitations of course. But with the big advantage of reducing costs and efforts on client installation, configuration and maintenance, since the “application” is installed and configured on one computer (a simple web server), accessible via a web browser.  I am not talking about “simple” web-applications, but applications similar to their desktop equivalent. It seems that nowadays people seems to mix “sites” with some functionalities with “applications”. Or maybe the “site” term is not used anymore, when it involves programming…? K Well, nothing of this is new to OsFlasher’s. :o)   If I could go back in time, I would make CastingOffice’s code very different, with the experience gained these two months. Now, i’ll just improve some things, deliver the prototype to the faculty on 1st July (and finish it later, on October), and start a new project on 2nd July, also using the same technologies, workflow and methodologies. But first, there are some important questions opened. So, here it goes:       1.       Licensing ----------------------------------------------------------------- As students, me and my colleagues never gave much importance to licensing K. Let’s face it, here in Portugal, and in great part of the world, people are not educated to follow licenses – except when it refers to “software in a box”, of course. I am now finishing my graduation, so I won’t be a student no more, and if everything works fine, I’ll be producing commercial products for living. But I know nothing about licensing. Thinking on it, I don’t remember nothing being taught on faculty about licenses!. I’ve followed the recent discussion on OsFlash ML (“MPL/GPL and SWF”), and became worried about this subject. If I pretend to commercially distribute CastingOffice, I should worry about what? I’ve used MTASC, AMFPHP, Eclipse+ASDT+ANT+AnyEdit, ASWING, ARP+Extensions(Grant and Herreman), PHPThumb, PHP and MySQL. Is there anything I should know before selling the application (if the opportunity occurs)?       2.       UML <-> Actionscript code ----------------------------------------------------------------- Not a question, but just a subject I’ve already referred on the ML: there is lack of a tool, or preferable, an Eclipse plugin that permits code generation AND live bidirectional synchronization with UML and Actionscript. Doxygen was referred, and POJO generation from actionscript too, but does this (will) allow code with UML sync? I think this is essential to mature and robust application team development. I’ve used it with JAVA, and after getting used to it I’ve felt that yes, programmer’s life can be beautiful! Without this kind of feature it will be way too difficult to develop well structured big applications using Actionscript on an agile team development environment. Does it justifies the effort of developing something on this, considering that AS2 will soon be “replaced” with AS3?         3.       ASWing and XML (or visual creation of forms) ----------------------------------------------------------------- ASWing is without doubt GREAT and BEAUTIFUL (iiley, you rule!). But it would be better if it was possible to create ASWing GUI’s with XML, or even better, if it was possible to visually place elements on visual forms, generating XML files that would be interpreted by actionscript. I’ve seen that Simon Wacker has done a great job on creating a XML dialect for Flash user interfaces, and this is already a big step. But more work and documentation has to be done on this area to stop user interface design from being a big pain in the ars*. Other thing that should be taken in consideration is the need for more examples and documentation on LAF on ASWing. But, let me say it again, ASWing is Beautiful! :D         4.       The future with Actionscript 3 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Actionscript 3 is already breathing…. and sooner or later Flash 9 will be born (April 2007,  I guess). MTASC will not compile AS3. What will happen then? Back to old, ugly and slow Flash IDE (without offense, dear Macr… Adobe :o) )? Maybe Haxe? Maybe Flex 2?   Haxe seems to be great, and very well done. But there are some things that makes me want to wait before developing on haxe: general public adoption, success cases, the problem that it would be necessary to teach this new language to each person that would want to join me in the future, the current tools developed that would need to be ported… I know almost nothing about Flex 2. But I know it involves money. A lot of money… And money is something I don’t have, faculty has sucked my and my parent’s pockets till the last drop!. Do you think that the investment that needs to be made to acquire, learn, develop, and deploy Flex 2 applications is justified? What’s the cheapest way to start developing and deploying AS3 applications (in a legal way, of course! :o) )?         5.       Server side language ----------------------------------------------------------------- I use PHP since 1999. I’ve always loved PHP. But experience taught me that good engineering and maintainability can only be achieved with mature programming. I’ve made some Java desktop applications, without loving the language itself (it’s SLOW), but loving the philosophy. In CastingOffice we used PHP, but sometimes I wished we were using JAVA. We haven’t, because we knew nothing about how JAVA behaves on the internet: is it fast? Is it stable? Is it easy to configure? Does it consume too much server’ resources? Is it easy to find a good http server that serves JAVA? (Good and.. cheap?) OpenAMF is as good as AMFPHP is? What about alternatives?       6.       Server side 2-tier development and design patterns justified? ----------------------------------------------------------------- We have developed CastingOffice’s server side in a 2-tier basis, using PHP. The lowest tier - the database layer - is responsible for executing SQL queries on the database. The second tier is responsible for business controlling and data consistency. And we have a “+1” half-tier, that exposes the business layer to the outside, using AMFPHP. We haven’t  used any design patterns, since our purpose was mainly to achieve what the service was intended to (SOA). My question is: what do you normally do server side? Just one layer (the service), and directly access the database? N-tier development? Or you go further, and apply design patterns to achieve a more structured application? In other others, is it preferable a data driven programming (db, our option) or data persistence (OO)? I know the first one Is far better in efficiency, but for big applications shouldn’t data persistence be preferred?         7.       XML Driven Databases ----------------------------------------------------------------- I think that in future native XML Database will be preferable to current plain database solutions. If you know what I’m talking about, you’ll probably agree with me. If you don’t know what is a XML Driven Database, I advice you to take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xml_database . Does anyone here ever used XML databases? What is your opinion on this subject? Are there web hosting offering xml databases already? (haven’t found none yet K).           8.       MovieClipLoader ----------------------------------------------------------------- MovieClipLoader is sh*t when it comes to load one resource at a time (Queue Loading). Then, I’ve said it… I know there are solutions, but they all seem to have the same problem: if you remove the movieclip from the stage before the resource is loaded (and that happens a lot, especially if you have a nervous user using your application :o) ) the Queue loader crashes (resource is loaded, but onLoadInit is not called and no error is thrown). Ok, creating an onUnload event should solve this, but by some reason it didn’t for us: sometimes onUnload works, others not only doesn’t work, as it originate strange behaviors. Well, the main thing is that I’ve said that moviecliploader sucks… :P         I think that these questions are very important when talking about maintainable web application development, ESPECIALLY if are like me: you want to create something in the right way, but you don’t have a coin in your pockets…  Your opinion on the previous subjects is very welcome, not only for me, but also to everyone with the same questions. I think it should be better to answer each question as a separate thread, if your prefer!     Thanks to you all. And, if you’ve reached this point, I must say: you have a place in heaven !! :D     João Saleiro, Portugal

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