Developer's Blog

I was invited by Mihaela Barbu to Adobe Romania : we will talk about how I use Flex, what’s so God damn good about it, and most important, my Flex 4 wish list. Since the meeting is next week, I’ll have to put together a list – I usually write this kind of lists on my desktop or talk about them to my beloved one (someday I’ll buy her diamonds for the patience of listening me talking like a mad scientist). This time I will do it different, having the proof over time beside me – and hoping that all points will be checked (did you saw The Bucket List?).

Now seriously, why would a Flex developer complete such a list, immediately after Flex 3 SDK was released? And you see, all that comes into my mind is related to Flex Builder because as a developer, if I need something and the SDK permits it, I’ll just start building. Ok, there are some parts – like garbage collection – which will go to this wish list. So here is the thin list, three ways:

A. Wishes for the Adobe Flash Player

• #1. Chronologically, the first unresolved issue is the black application controls (there is no possibility to set the text selection color). I wish that the Flash player will let the developer choose the text selection color, or present an video inverse color scheme to avoid the workaround.
• #2. Encouraging the use of PDF : how nice it will be when the Flash player will contain code for saving PDF instead of printing and all that from a Flex application? I’m sure that the day when this is possible without needing third party software, will be a D-day for the Flex developers and Flex applications. I guess you’ve got my point…
• #3. This point is more about the wrapper, but is a very common scenario nowadays : since Internet Explorer refuses to die and I, developer, consider that more than 80% of the users around the world don’t know how to use their browsers, I wish that the wrapper somehow detect if someone’s IE doesn’t permit add-ons being started in “safe-mode”. I used quotes with safe-mode since there is no safe mode of using IE – start using FireFox now!
• #4. Access to the garbage collection please! Not only in the debugger. For the developers who really knows what are they doing – and I promise to became one soon after this feature is released – I know that this will be like getting hands on their own objects, feeling close to God and C++

Observation : I agree with the wish list (including some comments) published here.

B. Wishes for Flex SDK – this is really short

• #1. A better RichTextEditor – my guess is that it is still limited due to the sandbox, which makes the developer upload the picture before we can insert it into an RichTextEditor (with a custom control, of course). Using XHTML?
• #2. Page-able collections – in a more elegant manner than today.

Observation : I wish (for myself) to design applications which makes better use of the Model from the MVC – I’ll get back to this idea in a future post. The list for the SDK is short for a simple reason : we develop! Therefore, this wish list is constantly checked and rewritten.

C. Wishes for Flex Builder

• #1. internationalization helper tool – you select an STR_ID and call through a shortcut a wizard which inserts the same STR_ID into properties files (you’ve had let system know about) letting you complete the string after equal in all properties files;
• #2. test area – which lets you test a project (even a chunk of code), without create new project, without having to define a lot of stuff to see the Flex code running (generally, it will be used for taking a bug out of the system and treat it, or for optimization purposes – when you copy-paste a chunk of your code).
• #3. the coder has this area where he can collect all sort of tests in snippets and even in bug-solving collections which can be submitted to his personal blog or to a community site…
• #4. command line parameters wizard : every time I want to do something (complex?) with the command line I’ll have to check an external source for parameters (and I guess is not hard to build)

Among this list I should have written about documentation and samples. The great mistake about documentation is the manner in which it is organized. First, I wish there was a TextInput which filters a list of class names (I scroll to much and I’m getting tired, eventually bored and start looking somewhere else). Second, I wish there was a map (like cheat sheets has), made in Flex, in which you can go inside component methods and properties – lets say using the SpringGraph. Also, I’m imagining the day that documentation will talk about technique (and I’m not referring only Flex, but most of the good languages) – I agree, that’s the role of community and this is how you can find good inspirational websites, which explain “how you should do it!” with a bit of “why this way”.

I will get back on this subject, mostly with wishes for the SDK.

Today I was surfing on various Romanian blogs, when I suddenly realized that the next big thing that should happen is the improvement of commenting manner on blogs. My vision includes the following functionality : the commenter should be able to select the post’s paragraphs he is referring to. An mouse over functionality on a small portion of the quote should show the entire paragraph from that post, so the reader should not be forced to navigate up and down and in the same time, the comment remains a comment, not an collection of quotes. I guess that a (net) web structure for representing the post and its comments, would be very nice as an alternative to the linear display adopted today.

The second important thing should be the comment’s replies manner, represented in the same web structure – the @ operator (which indicates to whom the comment is addressing) will disappear and the conversation will be easy to follow.

Please feel free to add functionality ideas if you have them, since this “project” will go straight into my long to-do things. Speaking of to-do list : I was thinking about publishing a full list with descriptions of these projects, which for now represents “Dead Projects Society”…

Some time ago, I’ve read “A dozen of 2008 predictions” post from Farata System. The part which impressed me most was about code generators, I quote point 13: “The in software development will change to wider use of code generators. Forget about heavy frameworks regardless of what programming language you use. In a simple case, use some XML style sheets combined with the metadata that describe your application objects to automatically generate the code for these objects. On the larger scale, the entire application may be described using metadata and the XML, and an appropriate code generator will do the job. So programming will change from writing a tedious code that requires lots of coders to describing the metadata and writing custom code generators.”

I must admit that would be very nice if the most important coding platforms would migrate to the paradigm change imposed by Adobe Flex, but I’m not that optimistic about this happening in this year – even mr. Yakov admits this answering to an commentary.

The next important thing which I personally expect to happen is the adoption of the Flex coding style in a wide know platform – the rest will follow. I’m absolutely sure that Flex, by it’s coding paradigm, makes a coder adopt naturally the Object Oriented Programming – as it should be. From my experience I know that there is a strong tendency for linear programming when you are doing OOP. Flex helped me to get rid of this tendency and organized the importance of things in an natural way, keeping my need to optimize at a acceptable level.

I cannot agree with “programming will change from writing a tedious code that requires lots of coders to describing the metadata and writing custom code generators”. My guess is that a unified XML metadata that describe the application objects and automatically generate the code will push coders to specialize in certain algorithms.