Jude: Actually I think my needs are fairly simple from a development point of view.
I really only work on one module at a time, and am looking for a visual editor. If you want to see a sample of an application I have setup for beginning my leap into the unknown; The URL is http://flex.yozyo.net/production To login, you can use either; U: dmanager P: mpassword U:duser P:UPASSWORD You will notice there is a virtual desktop with "programs" you can load using the menu bar. Since each "program" (actually individual SWF files) is self contained, there really is little to do other than visual editing of static components on panels. The MXML panels seldom contain anything other than static components. We sometimes will hide/overlay components, but we do that in actionscript and test it at run time. If anything would be useful other than a WYSIWYG editor, that is a debugger, which allows stepping through code, seeing variables real time and trapping errors. Paul R. Stearns Advanced Consulting Enterprises, Inc. 15280 NW 79th Ct. Suite 250 Miami Lakes, Fl 33016 Voice: (305)623-0360 x107 Fax: (305)623-4588 ---------------------------------------- From: QA <[email protected]> Sent: 10/23/19 3:06 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: IDE for Royale Hi Paul, I've been attempting to solve the DV problem for while with some projects. I designed a DV that exported to MXML and I had some success and in some areas I learned some things. It is a work in progress but it has been shelved for about a year. It's a long story so I'll get right to the main points. What I got to work well was reading and writing single or multiple MXML documents but full applications were much more difficult. Because of the nature of Flash I could load in a SWF, traverse the Flex component tree and then export MXML but it didn't fit well with developers workflow. Developers would have a MXML or AS3 class that followed their own code paths or had frameworks that loaded screens through code. A full application couldn't easily be represented by a design view unless it adhered to a workflow that was compatible to the design tool. For Royale, Alex had a tool that would monitor the MXML files in a directory, that you, the developer, would change from time to time in your code editor. At the same time your app would be running in the browser. As you updated the MXML, your app would be updated giving you a real time preview of your code changes. I was looking into what it would take to get it all working but I didn't have the time at the time but the concept is better suited in my opinion. If we were to separate out the views from the main project (or the compilation phase) or parse them or support parsing them or the attributes at runtime a design view would be much simpler to support. If the views didn't change much it wouldn't matter as long as you keep the views independent. For example, your designer can come along and say here is the Intro Screen.mxml, here is the MainView.mxml, here is the login screen.mxml, etc. And then using an agreed upon way to display or parse those you could keep the views really separate. For the last few projects I've been working on Web Export for Adobe XD and with some work it could support an Royale export target. It's a plugin that takes an artboard or screen and exports it to HTML. There's no reason it couldn't support MXML. Here is the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFBNT6gqr5u_NvUaLdHziGES_7Rw8-2pX Here it is supporting some of the Materialize Components (roughly): https://youtu.be/8V0Tzr6YUtI You could have a Jewel component set or a basic component set. XD supports about 90% of the design features that you're asking for. JudeOn 10/15/19 10:22 AM, Paul Stearns wrote: Alex: Assuming we have containers like canvases with X-Y coordinate placement, I would need; Drag & Drop components.Resize components.Anchoring components relative to container.Component alignment tools (tops, middles, bottoms, lefts, centers, rights).Undo/redo.Cut/Copy/Paste & duplicate components.Selecting multiple components for drag/drop/cut/copy/paste.Keyboard arrow use for nudging selected components. The features described are available in MS VS and Flexbuilder 3 which we use heavily. Paul R. Stearns Advanced Consulting Enterprises, Inc. 15280 NW 79th Ct. Suite 250 Miami Lakes, Fl 33016 Voice: (305)623-0360 x107 Fax: (305)623-4588 ---------------------------------------- From: Alex Harui <[email protected]> Sent: 10/15/19 1:56 AM To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: IDE for Royale FWIW, past discussions on this topic brought up the fact that the standard for “interactive developer-driven placement of widgets” in the HTML/JS/CSS world are things like JSFiddle which are considered much faster and more “real-time” than the workflow required by Flash Builder’s Design View. FB’s DV was the best Adobe could do because that technology required compiling a SWF and re-starting the Flash Player usually as a browser plugin. In the HTML world, you can just tweak a number, hit F5 and see it. That means to me that DV-like things really ought to be more JSFiddle-ish. The big difference is that instead of editing the source MXML, compiling, and re-loading in the browser, it might be better to build a tool that maps the HTML DOM to the MXML widgets so you can either edit in the Browser and some plug-in will offer to update your MXML files, or some other kind of plugin watches MXML files and updates the DOM in the browser, skipping the compile/transpile step if changes are only attributes. I have a prototype of the latter that uses an AIR app to monitor MXML files and update a SWF via LocalConnection. Judah was playing around with it, but not sure if he got it to work for JS. Then the Royale IDE providers may not need to produce a DV-equivalent, or can leverage code in our repos to provide something like it. DV was a pain to support in the framework as it broke the rules about Application being the top-level widget in a Flex app. For Royale, we could add beads to the components that make it easier for them to be tracked. I’d be interested in hearing more from Paul and anyone else who needs a WYSIWYG editing tool as to what the “must haves” really are. Would it be ok if you had to do the layout outside of the IDE in another tool? Would it be ok to have to take longer to re-transpile everything if you touch any code (Script block, event handlers in MXML, etc). I personally don’t have the bandwidth to work on this stuff right now, but maybe others can. It “should” be easier to update the browser for certain attribute changes in MXML or vice-versa than build a full DV. HTH, -Alex From: Paul Stearns <[email protected]> Reply-To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Monday, October 14, 2019 at 11:46 AM To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: IDE for Royale Carols: Without a WYSIWYG editing tool to develop with, developer productivity is greatly reduced. Most of our applications are done using direct placement on canvases. We anchor components and use percentages from time to time. One of the main features we found attractive about Flex was the ability to create desktop like applications deployed as thin client applications. To provide that look and feel placement and tolerances of components is crucial. Traditional web based applications (we wrote ASP prior to converting to Flex and we currently write some in Oracle's Apex) just don't provide the same level of control over the user experience. What is not important is responsive design. These applications are not designed for mobile devices. We believe by restricting our design to be usable on a phone or tablet, makes the application less functional for how people will actually use it, which is sitting at a desk. When writing data entry intensive applications, keyboards and monitors are the target devices, every time a person needs to reach for a mouse, or touch the screen they are wasting time. We have no problem using new tools, as long as they are at least as robust as the old tools. Paul R. Stearns Advanced Consulting Enterprises, Inc. 15280 NW 79th Ct. Suite 250 Miami Lakes, Fl 33016 Voice: (305)623-0360 x107 Fax: (305)623-4588 ---------------------------------------- From: Carlos Rovira <[email protected]> Sent: 10/14/19 2:08 PM To: Paul Stearns <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: IDE for Royale Hi Paul, as part of your move to a new technology my advice is that you embrace with the change the new tools. In this case, Moonshine or VSCode are the main ones for now. Flash Builder is a tool in some kind of EOL by Adobe, without any update in about 10 years, so although I know some people is still using it, and I think can work with Royale with some tweaks, I think is better to change it for something fresh and new that is getting updates each month. Just my 2. El lun., 14 oct. 2019 a las 19:55, Paul Stearns (<[email protected]>) escribió: Does FlashBuilder 4.7 support Royale? I saw a GitHub project that seemed to indicate it would. I was unsure whether that product was being maintained. Paul R. Stearns Advanced Consulting Enterprises, Inc. 15280 NW 79th Ct. Suite 250 Miami Lakes, Fl 33016 Voice: (305)623-0360 x107 Fax: (305)623-4588 ---------------------------------------- From: Piotr Zarzycki <[email protected]> Sent: 10/14/19 1:44 AM To: Paul Stearns <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Subject: IDE for Royale Great question Paul! We do have separate type of project in Moonshine called - Visual Editor. Currently we offer only Flex and PrimeFaces type of project, where you can creat simple UI and export to Adobe Air and Web type of project. We do have plan in future add Visual Editor for Royale. Thanks, Piotr On Sun, Oct 13, 2019, 11:47 PM Paul Stearns <[email protected]> wrote: One thing I can't seem to find, is a GUI editor for MXML files in Moonshine. Am I missing something, or is it only a text editor? If Moonshine does not have a GUI editor, are there any IDEs with GUI editors for Royale/MXML? Paul R. Stearns Advanced Consulting Enterprises, Inc. 15280 NW 79th Ct. Suite 250 Miami Lakes, Fl 33016 Voice: (305)623-0360 x107 Fax: (305)623-4588 ---------------------------------------- From: Piotr Zarzycki <[email protected]> Sent: 10/13/19 3:01 PM To: Paul Stearns <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Subject: IDE for Royale Hi Paul, We will release Moonshine probably this week with update to 0.9.6. Each Royale version should work with Moonshine. Try download manually from royale website binaries for 0.9.6 and add to Moonshine. Existing Royale project if contains file *..as3proj you can double click and it will open in Moonshine. Not that if you choose 0.9.6 you may end up with issue described here [1]. I've provided workaround here [2] Flex project if contains Flash Builder file you can also open trough Moonshine by pointing folder by options "Open/Import project..." from Home tab. - Maybe you will have to go trough some wizard during that process, than select appropriate template during setup. There is possibility that you will have to correct some settings after importing project - right click on project and Choose "Settings" - review them to see if all paths are correct. You will have to build probably tourdeflex using ant script (still can open project in Moonshine), cause it's multimodule application and we are not handle properly multimodule app in Moonshine yet and it didn't contains also file to open in Moonshine. I just fixed it [3]. Try checkout that folder [4]. I don't know how to properly build tourdeflex by ant, but if script is working you can do use Moonshine as well - right click on project, choose settings and in "Ant build" tab select build.xml in folder tourdeflexmodules. Than choose Project -> Build with Apache Ant. Any non multimodule app you should be able to build by options available in Project. Finally you can read more about emulation components here [5] [1] http://apache-royale-development.20373.n8.nabble.com/Broken-royale-config-in-JS-only-build-of-released-Apache-Royale-SDK-0-9-6-td12515.html [2] http://apache-royale-development.20373.n8.nabble.com/Broken-royale-config-in-JS-only-build-of-released-Apache-Royale-SDK-0-9-6-td12515.html#a12543 [3] https://github.com/apache/royale-asjs/commit/0117eaf5cd8e51024c0818af7ad67b988630f282 [4] https://github.com/apache/royale-asjs/tree/develop/examples/mxroyale/tourdeflexmodules [5] https://github.com/apache/royale-asjs/wiki/emulation-components Thanks, Piotr On Sun, Oct 13, 2019, 7:45 PM Paul Stearns <[email protected]> wrote: I downloaded Moonshine. I told it to download Royale, which I noticed it is downloading 0.9.4. I think I want 0.9.6 which is the latest & greatest. Will 0.9.6 work with Moonshine? How do I upgrade? Last but not least, is there a tutorial on how to migrate/convert an entire flex project to Royale? Perhaps how to open a Flexbuilder 3 project with Moonshine. Paul R. Stearns Advanced Consulting Enterprises, Inc. 15280 NW 79th Ct. Suite 250 Miami Lakes, Fl 33016 Voice: (305)623-0360 x107 Fax: (305)623-4588 ---------------------------------------- From: Piotr Zarzycki <[email protected]> Sent: 10/13/19 12:28 PM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: IDE for Royale Hi Paul, Here is the link to information about IDE [1] Here is code to tourdeflex [2] and other Emulation components examples. [1] https://apache.github.io/royale-docs/get-started/development-tools [2] https://github.com/apache/royale-asjs/tree/develop/examples/mxroyale Thanks, Piotr On Sun, Oct 13, 2019, 6:08 PM Paul Stearns <[email protected]> wrote: To begin dabbling with Royale, I would like to use an IDE. For Flex I am using Flexbuilder 3. What is the best IDE for Royale? Where can I get it? Alex mentioned tourdeflex migration example, where can I find that? Paul R. Stearns Advanced Consulting Enterprises, Inc. 15280 NW 79th Ct. Suite 250 Miami Lakes, Fl 33016 Voice: (305)623-0360 x107 Fax: (305)623-4588 -- Carlos Rovira http://about.me/carlosrovira
