eric e. dolecki

Interactive Technologist and Designer

Tonight was the first Boston Flex User Group meeting, and it was held at Adobe Newton. The scene is familiar to many of us in the area... through reception to the stairwell on the right, up, passcard through a door on the right at the top of the stairs and into the common area on the second floor. Garage door partitioned presentation area, ping pong table, booth seats, and a large kitchen. The waft of freshly baked Bertucci's pizza. Lots of refreshments, lots of chairs, and lots of Adobe folk presenting code to the masses.

And tonight was no exception. There were TONS of people who attended. Which surprised me because the meeting was about the Flex 3 open-source SDK. Developing for it, against it, fixing bugs in the branches (the trunk is Flex 4 (Gumbo)), and there was a whole of very technical talk going on.

For whatever reason, its always 8,000,000• in there, and the screen goes a little fuzzy on me. Gave me a headache when studying the code on the screen. Maybe its just lack of caffeine or its late in the day and my eyes are tired and the room is dim with slightly flickering lighting?

Eclipse was the bitch tool of choice of the evening. Went through RPC source, learned a lot about dataBinding (its an expensive operation that adds lots of code to your SWF so you should think about that), why compiling can take a while (if you edit a class, it can percolate through other classes and cause them to need a recompile too), MXMLC (like mini-compilers), there are tools already in the SDK that dump your SWF out to readable XML & show what is taking up what room in the binary, a compiler that will daisy-chain compile for you, and more.

Would you like to contribute to the SDK source code? Help fix bugs? Get really dirty in the bowels of the compiler (requiring ANT to compile)? Then this meeting was for you. It could have gotten even more technical, but I think tonight the amount of glazed eyes probably served as a warning to not go that much further down the rabbit hole.

I enjoyed the session quite a bit, although I won't be downloading the SDK to any local SVN repository any time soon. At the end we were served some useful tidbits for use without having to worry about ANT or breakpoints in SDK source code, etc. The turnout was fantastic... to guess I'd say there were probably nearly 100 people. Not nearly enough pizza, but I think the people who rolled in late probably already ate.

Nice meeting. I'll be at the next one. Oh, I saw you Scott Janousek on my way out, but the door was already closing behind me.

 

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