Things have been getting interesting at the cartoon factory lately. I spent most of July working random little projects, mainly fixing bugs and filling for colleagues who were out on vacation. But now I have a new project to get into. It’s a mass personalization area for our site. And I get to do it in a whole new development envioronment and platform, Flex. So I’ve been learning Flex, checking out the docs and tutorials, and trying some experiments. For someone like me Flex is pretty cool, cuz it’s basically Flash: The Next Generation. It’s much more developer- (as opposed to animator-) centric, and shows a heavy influences of J2EE. The IDE is the Eclipse platform, and it uses ANT build scripts and all that. Like Flash it’s centered on the ActionScript programming language, and introduces a new markup language MXML, which allows for rapid scripting of UI’s, and some basic but nontrivial behaviors like event mapping and data binding. It has a massive amount of pre-rolled objects and common plumbing built in, too.
So I’m off to a good start, but it doesn’t take long to get to the point where MXML is not sufficient and you have to use good ol’ Actionscript. Still, the level of built in support out of the box is pretty impressive. I know tutorials are generally designed to show off a product’s strength but this one is pretty cool: I built a feed reader for my blog in only an hour or so. You can play with it here:
http://zingman.com/experiments/flex/feed_reader/main.html
And the best thing about it is that the source code for entire application is only half a page long.
So stay tuned, I’ll let you know sometime this fall how the project turns out.