Love them or hate them Flex frameworks are all the rave. So what’s your Flex framework of choice, for now?

Andy Powell has an unbiased post about choosing amongst the various Flex frameworks. I think his advice is spot on.

As for myself: I’m still recovering from a bad experience with Cairngorm. ( You know the saying, “Once bitten… twice shy.”) So frameworks aren’t really my bag. Plus, as a freelancer I’m the sole developer on almost every project I work on. One of the benefits - I’m told - of frameworks is to make it easier for teams to work on a project which doesn’t apply to me.

An experienced developer once told me that a framework is just a collection of design patterns. That much seems to be true. As my programming skills evolve so does my toolkit of design patterns that I seem to apply to each project. So I guess I’m rolling my own, very slowly.

Laura and Nahuel from ASFusion.com gave a presentation at 360Flex about their Mate framework. I learned a ton about how to evolve my own framework from them and will probably watch their presentation over and over until I get it. If frameworks are anything of a mystery to you then I’d recommend you watch it as well because they show how seasoned developers approach a project.

Please comment below if you have any advise to share or just want to plug your framework of choice.

I’m here at the 360Flex conference right now and having trouble getting any Degrafa code to work on Ubuntu. I just sat down with Juan Sanchez and he helped me write a very simple test that should work, but doesn’t. So we’d like to know if this is some issue with my particular setup or if it’s something with FlexBuilder alpha 4 for Linux or even the Flash Player.

So if you have Ubuntu it would be great if you could try to duplicate this sample for us. You’ll need to get the the latest Degrafa SWC and drop it in your libs folder of your project.

Here’s the code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
                layout="absolute"
                backgroundGradientColors="[#333333, #222222]"
                viewSourceURL="srcview/index.html"
                xmlns="http://www.degrafa.com/2007">

<Surface>
	<GeometryGroup>
		<Ellipse
			width="100" height="100">
			<fill>
				<LinearGradientFill angle="90">

					<GradientStop
                                                color="#FFFFFF" />
					<GradientStop
                                                color="#123456" />

				</LinearGradientFill>
			</fill>
		</Ellipse>
	</GeometryGroup>
</Surface>

</mx:Application>

You ever wonder why Deepa never seems to get any work done? Well, now you know. :-)

Hey Matt, let’s do lunch.

I turned off the FlipCam too early. After the video ends Mark Anders comes back to the podium and says something like, “I don’t know what to do now. I really thought she was going to show us some Thermo stuff.”

Sweet news: The Flex team has been working with the Degrafa team to bring the two together for Flex4. Here’s Juan Sanchez and Tom Gonzalez talking about what we can expect.

Justin Everett-Church showed off some cool visuals of the new features in the Flash Player 10 - Astro. We get to see some PixelBender, the new text layout examples, and a big hand for 3D ,or 2.5D but still amazing.

I’m here at the 360Flex conference in San Jose and I have my wife’s FlipCam. Here’s some of the bits from day 1.

They gave us “The King 3D glasses”. I guess somebodies going to have a 3D demo later. Or maybe they just want us to look like dorks.

360Flex has a thingy going on for attendees to put up videos about . . . I’m not really sure what’s it supposed to be about. So I had fun.

I’ve disabled my blog - temporarily - for all versions of Internet Explorer. Why, just to protest the involvement that Microsoft had in the dumping of ECMA4. And, because they’re Microsoft and I like to pick on them.

All I did was add this Javascript code to the header.php file of my Wordpress theme:

if (/MSIE (\d+\.\d+);/.test(navigator.userAgent)){ //test for MSIE x.x;
window.location="http://polygeek.com/dIE.htm";
}

This has no effect on RSS readers and I don’t really care. It’s just a statement. I know this doesn’t hurt Microsoft but you never know. Enough people start doing this it will make a difference. And any little thing I can do that might impact Microsoft in a negative way, even slightly, is worth it. Now it’s personal.

You should know right off that I’m about the least qualified person to speak about the intricacies of computer languages. But I’m going to go there anyway.

By now you’ve heard the news that ECMA 4.0 has died and been replaced by ECMA 3.1. A lot of people think it’s another power move by Microsoft and I certainly wouldn’t put it past them. Hell, it’s why they are who they are.

So here’s my two cents worth: Screw’em. I’m an Actionscript developer. I don’t use and don’t plan to use Javascript or C# or any other language for the client side. Why the hell would I? I don’t care one iota if Actionscript is standards compliant. Just make it the best frakking language it can be so that I can do my job better and faster.

John Grden pointed out that everyone seems to have it in for Adobe. So why not turn the tables. We all know that the Flash player is the most ubiquitous software EVER. Adobe, I say use it to your advantage. Wait until Flash player 11 and make sure that it and every other version of the Flash Player can’t possibly work in Internet Explorer. Lets see how long those IE numbers hold up when no one using IE can go to youTube. Yeah, they would sink like a rock.

I’m all for playing nice in the community. But when someone, Microsoft and Apple especially, do something underhanded to hurt Adobe I take it personally. I wish I had a wildly successful website just so that I could disable it in IE. Hummm, now that you mention it, maybe I can live with a 30% decrease in traffic on this blog.

I’m going to say something here that I hardly like to admit but it’s the truth: Windows XP is a damn good OS. And that’s coming from someone who loathes Microsoft.

I’ve seen OS-X in action and it looks really sweet. I’ve noticed that most Flex developers I meet at conferences are using Macs these days and I was tempted, very tempted, to get an Apple laptop and start migrating in that direction. But then I was reminded of what a shitty company Apple is with all their proprietary ways and holier than thou attitude. I just can’t support a company like that. ( That’s just a personal idiocracy of mine that I happen to be very opinionated about silly, unimportant things. )

So what’s a geek to do? The two most obvious choices for an OS come from companies that I detest. And as rock solid as XP is I don’t want to use it for the rest of my life and Vista is, it’s - shiver - I try not to think about it.

But then last year at MAX07 the clouds parted over my OS woes and a ray of brilliant sunshine shown upon the stage as Adobe announced that they were working on FlexBuilder for Linux. There was singing and dancing in the isles. Salvation was at hand.

A few months ago I bought a shiny new Dell XPS M1330 laptop with Ubuntu. This was my first experience with Ubuntu aside from booting up a few times on a CD. Enough with the preamble, lets get on with setting up Ubuntu as a Flex development machine.

First things second
Go get FlexBuilder for Linux. Of course this is the FlexBuilder plugin for Eclipse so you’ll need to grab Eclipse and install it before you install FlexBuilder. Setting up Eclipse is very easy to do but if you run into problems there are a ba’zillion articles out there to help with every conceivable error since Eclipse is very popular on Ubuntu. ( Download Eclipse for Linux here. )

For me the only problem I had installing FlexBuilder was figuring out where all the files were. For instance, I have to point the installer at the Eclipse folder. I know where everything is on XP but I’m still pretty lost on Ubuntu. But after three tries I finally got it right and FlexBuilder is working just fine.

Catching AIR
I installed AIR next and haven’t had any issues at all. I’m also developing an AIR application for a client that does a lot of saving files from a web server to the local drive and uses SQL-lite. Everything seems to work exactly the same between Ubuntu and XP. I know there are a few issues but this is still a beta version of AIR on Linux.

Installing SVN for FlexBuilder
This is where I had the most trouble. I have no idea why it’s so hard to get SVN working on Eclipse. You’d think it would be as easy as: install this, then this, then this and boom - you’re done. But no. Here’s how I got it to work:

Install SVN - turn off: Integrations ( Optional )
Install Buckminster - turn off: Buckminster ( Optional )
Install Subversive - turn off: Subversive Integration Plug’in’- ( incubation )
Install Subversive SVN Connectors - turn off: Subversive SVN Connectors “You only need the Sources”

Don’t ask me if you have any questions because I don’t understand either. But SVN is working and I don’t know what I’d do without it.

A few useful sources
I know there’s nothing in this post of much use to someone installing FlexBuilder on Ubuntu but these might help:

• How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu
• Installing Flex Builder Linux alpha 3 on Ubuntu 8.04
• Ubuntu LAMP Server Guide - Configure Apache, mySQL, and cgi-bin

That last link for Ubuntu LAMP was a life saver. I had no end of failures trying to get LAMP working so that I could use AMFPHP. The author, Sam Davis, of that articles gets lots of kudos for a fine set of instructions that actually work.

I’m slowly getting used to Ubuntu. My hope is that in a year or so I’ll be able to install Ubuntu on my desktop and use it as my primary development environment. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to ditch XP completely because I need things like the Flash FLV encoder and Photoshop but eventually I’ll get there.