Flex yer Domino
Category Domino
A few weeks ago I played with Adobe Flex for a couple hours. I soon became distracted by other things and never got around to posting about the results. But I remembered tonight that I hadn't, and figured I might as well.
Flex, in case you haven't already seen it, is a framework for building Flash RIA's. You define the application's interface and behavior in an XML file, and it generates a SWF for you. Since it's intended to be for full-fledged applications, not "movies", it's quite data-centric. And it happens to be very easy to use. The official IDE is based on Eclipse, and costs $499... can't imagine being able to justify that expense any time soon. But the good news is they have a free SDK. So you can just write the XML in your favorite text editor, run the command line script that comes with the SDK, and you're done.
In very short order, I was able to write a basic but fully functioning contact manager. This example stores its data in a Domino database. Domino's ReadViewEntries URL command returns a format that doesn't play particularly nice with Flex, so the database contains a page with an embedded view allowing a much more friendly XML format. You can download the example database and source XML here.
A few weeks ago I played with Adobe Flex for a couple hours. I soon became distracted by other things and never got around to posting about the results. But I remembered tonight that I hadn't, and figured I might as well.
Flex, in case you haven't already seen it, is a framework for building Flash RIA's. You define the application's interface and behavior in an XML file, and it generates a SWF for you. Since it's intended to be for full-fledged applications, not "movies", it's quite data-centric. And it happens to be very easy to use. The official IDE is based on Eclipse, and costs $499... can't imagine being able to justify that expense any time soon. But the good news is they have a free SDK. So you can just write the XML in your favorite text editor, run the command line script that comes with the SDK, and you're done.
In very short order, I was able to write a basic but fully functioning contact manager. This example stores its data in a Domino database. Domino's ReadViewEntries URL command returns a format that doesn't play particularly nice with Flex, so the database contains a page with an embedded view allowing a much more friendly XML format. You can download the example database and source XML here.
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Comments
I've experimented a little with flex, but I haven't taken the time to fully immerse myself in the technology. I made a datagrid from an outline (?ReadEntries) / went through some examples.
One of the things I love is that they (Adobe) base the ActionScript on the ECMA-script standard. Makes it easy to get started, if you've done a bit of JavaScripting.
Posted by Tommy Valand At 03:13:36 On 08/10/2007 | - Website - |
There is a 30 day trial version of Flex available on the Adobe site for those of us who are text editor phobic;
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Posted by Ed Maloney At 09:01:49 On 08/10/2007 | - Website - |
They also did a great job of keeping the XML format lean... the entire XML source for this example app is only 92 lines. That includes the markup that defines the interface as well as the CDATA-enclosed script that defines the behavior of each component. This is also the closest I've seen another framework get to the "single file" encapsulation we get with Domino. When you include references to images (like the ones used in the "action buttons", in this example), it compiles them into the SWF... so you don't have to upload them separately to the server. If implemented outside of Domino, you really only need three files: the HTML to embed the SWF, the SWF itself, and the JavaScript file that defines certain functions for handling cross-browser object embedding. Of course, it lacks the flexibility of being its own database, which is why integrating Flex with Domino seems like it could be a fairly powerful solution for RIA's.
Posted by Tim Tripcony At 09:03:14 On 08/10/2007 | - Website - |