Review of the last year
Nowadays it is expected that a blogger should do a year in review post, counting the good and the bad things. If that’s a coder has to do, than so be it. Here’s a small list of bad things:
1. Flex is very hard to learn: it is said that the very hard part comes from the component development model, but mostly because of the lack of proper documentation. That’s why snippets are needed and why there is a Flex Cook Book. It is easy to learn only if you came from ActionScript 2 and felt the need for a framework which keeps separate things separately. I’ve felt good in the Flex framework from the beginning mainly because I was trying to replicate it under ActionScript 2 (take a look to an old project of mine butangrup.ro)
2. Derived from point 1, cames the small number of real Flex coders. Most of them are still digging into Flex at the HBox level. Maybe there are a lot more, but I guess they stay in the underground zone being too busy to be active, or maybe Google is not strong enough to find them.
Also, take a look at this post.What do you see? I see a lot of comments regarding AJAX rather than Flex (the post’s title). Message to AJAX coders : please use AJAX if you are convinced that is a good and strong framework (even if Ted is chasing visitors inviting you to an “old” Flex-AJAX debate). There is nobody capable of convincing you to do otherwise. I’m pretty sure that you’ve heard about Spry, Bridge and you know that Flex can work well with AJAX. I have nothing against AJAX, I’m programming often mainly because of Google – that’s point 3.
3. I’ve read an interview with the CEO of Google which admitted that the main search engine of the world didn’t came up with a solution yet, regarding the swift content – that Google’s solution is still poor. I have some ideas about how this can be solved, but is not about me, isn’t it?
4. I had no experience with building in Linux, because I choose NOT to, yet. My previous experiences with Linux should make me set a goal for 2008, to migrate forever into penguin’s world.
The good things are few, but important: in just 8 months, I’ve managed to learn Flex to a level which I consider to be good enough. I’ve started in Flex because of AMF PHP, which was part of an ActionScript 2 project. After finishing that project, while searching for informations I’ve discovered Flex. Another good thing is that I don’t develop content administration pages in PHP anymore (which was a killer issue for me since day one, sensing that I’m spending too much time for building and customizing this part). My clients are happy now with shiny new administration pages, which looks good and feel strong, behaving like it supposed to do.
Another very good thing that happen was that Flex became open source, and I’ve had the opportunity of migrate from Flex 2 SDK to Flex 3 – seeing the framework being developed the way it should. I was able to see the future of Flex even if nowadays we are still in the desert.
Happy New Year everyone!
