Review of The Flex Authority Inaugural Issue - Part 1
Thanks to Judith Dinowitz, I received an advance PDF copy of The Flex Authority, the new Flex-focused quarterly journal by the people behind Fusion Authority Quarterly Update, Fusion Authority and House of Fusion. Jeffry Houser of the Flex Show
podcast is the editor of the new journal. The first issue is set to be
released at 360Flex which starts next week and I have an article in it
on Nahuel Foronda and Laura Arguello's Mate framework
for Flex. We all know that my article will be outstanding (hey! be
nice!), but how is the rest of the content? Below I give brief reviews of the first half of the
articles; I had hoped to review the entire journal but it seriously
includes so much content I just didn't have time to get through all of
it (and ithis review would have been too long). I will cover the second half in a
second review to come in the next few days.
As
Jeff notes in his editorial, each issue will have a focus to go along
with the regular columns and "wild-card" features. The focus of issue
one is AIR (for what its worth, my column falls under the wild-card
category). Shannon Hicks of Webapper writes a beginner's introduction to AIR, Charlie Key discusses using the SQLite database, Jack Herrington covers the file API, Theo E. Rushin, Jr. writes about occasionally connected API's, Johnny Boursiquot of Pier Inc. shows how to use PDF's in AIR and finally Giorgio Natili
discusses updating AIR applications. In between there are a number of
other articles, product reviews and interviews. With all the articles
in the focus, its a wonder they had room for my article at all, to be
honest.
Building Your First AIR Application with Flex by Shannon Hicks
Shannon
does an excellent job of covering a lot of ground for beginner's with
AIR in a limited amount of space. He goes through best practices and
considerations when programming for the desktop rather than the web
including differentUI and security considerations. He then walks
readers through creating a Hello World application which covers things
like the XML descriptor file and distribution considerations. Finally,
Shannon briefly covers the file API as a means of saving user
preferences.
The Component Lifecycle: Custom Component Recipe by Alex Harui and Gordon Smith
Calling themselves Flick and Flack, Alex and Gordon discuss topics from the Yahoo FlexCoders group. In this edition, they deal with issues related to creationComplete and callLater()
and how this relates to the order in which Flex processes components.
They offer some excellent insight specifically, I thought, when showing
theActionScript equivalent to an MXML tag to illuminate the order in
which items are process and events called. However, I found the
discussion format a little hard to follow as it felt as though it went
on tangents at times. Hopefully as the journal matures the kinks will
be worked out of this regular column.
Debugging Data Communications in Your Flex Applications by Nick Kwiatkowski
Nick
covers the variety of way available to communicate between Flex
applications and a variety of back-ends. These include XML, REST, SOAP,
FlashRemoting and LCDS . He then discusses the various points within
the communication chain where errors can occur, including on the
application server, across "the wire" and within Flex. Nick's article
is a good beginner's introduction to debugging in Flex, including a
tutorial on the Flex debugger.
Effective Flex Development: Version Control by Peter Bell
Peter
Bell's article barely touches upon Flex specifically but covers a very
important related topic. While discussing all of the most popular
version controls systems in general, Peter takes particularly deep
dives into Subversion (and tools likeSubclipse ) and Git. While the
Subversion tutorial was very informative, I was particularly interested
in Git since I had read a lot about it but never used it. Peter's depth
on Git isn't quite as much as much as on Subversion, he does link to a
number of excellent resources for getting started.
Working with Yahoo! Maps Part 1 by Brian Dunphy
The
first part of the series deals with getting your API key and then
getting everything set up in Flex Builder to work with Yahoo! Maps.
Brian then walks through creating a basic maps application showing how
you add the map to a project and then adds a marker to the map. I
personally haven't tried the Yahoo! Maps API but this article did a
good job of getting me interested as it doesn't appear too intimidating.
Developing a Game in Flex Part 1: Plans and Foundation by Billy D. Spelchan
This
is definitely a topic I have not seen a lot written on personally. In
this, the first of his series, Billy covers more considerations and
planning than actual code, though there is some code involved. Going
from options for developing games, to the possible types of games, to
creating a story and starting the code, Billy covers a wide-range of
areas. He discusses topics I rarely consider in Flex programming but
relate importantly to game development, such asframerates and timing as
well as handling map tiles and drawing. While there are portions of
this article that are definitely fascinating, for me personally it
probably isn't anything I will be putting to use anytime soon.
Under the Hood of a Flex/AIR Application Part 1 by John Wilker
In
this series, John takes a close look at the 360|Flex Survey Tool that
was built for 360Conferences to complete session surveys. The
application was built with AIR,Cairngorm, SQLite, ColdFusion with Flex Remoting and MySQL. John goes into a little bit of depth covering automatic conversion of CFC's to VO's
. Finally John covers creating the code to monitor online/offline
status and handle docking in the system tray. As with many of the part
1 articles in this issue, the real meat of the application isn't
discussed yet, but this already looks like a very good "real world"
application tutorial for AIR.
Part 2 of My Review Coming Soon
Part 2 of my review should appear within the next few days. Keep an eye out for it. In the meantime, I suggest you subscribe to Flex Authority ! :)
