Abobe unveils Thermo
and other experiments
If you know Flex, then you’ve heard of Ely Greenfield. He is the charting master, and a member of the Flex engineering team. Recently for MAX 2007 in Barcelona, Ely gave a “Flex Roadmap” presentation, see it here, and talked about several new experiments Adobe is considering for the Flex product. The first thing is the Flex designer application code-named “Thermo”. This app is aimed at designers and will give you a visual approach to creating Flex apps much more than design view does now. Think of it as Fireworks in Flex…You as the designer just draw out the layout, and Thermo will generate all the MXML code for you. In addition to Thermo, Ely goes on to talk about some of the experiments they are doing with the Flex framework, and re-thinking the way components are made and interact with each other. Ely talks about for example taking a step back and saying even though we already have these 7000 lines of code that make up the base List component (with all its layout, scrollbars, and button states) what really IS the core function of a List? Its core function is to show an Array of data, all the other stuff like layout, scrollbars, etc is just extra crap that has nothing to with the core function of a list, so this should be handled some where else through the use of visual extensions, and CSS states. This way, there is sort of an MVC kind of architecture going on within the components themselves. Leaving the developer to extend multiple facets of each component in ways that are difficult to do now. It’s kind if hard to explain here, but if you watch the videos it will become clear. As well as that, another thing Ely reveals is a new MXML Graphics engine for Flex, where we can now draw primitive shapes right in MXML. Keep in mind though that all of the examples Ely give come with the disclaimer (that he makes several times) that everything you see may or may not ever make into a release, the roadmap looks promising and very exciting if Adobe does go this route. I say, let’s just skip 3.0 and go straight to 4.
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