Recently in Open Source Flex SDK Category

There have been some questions over the last few days on the status of the Flex data visualization components and I wanted to make sure everyone knows our intentions.

First of all, you may notice that the 3.4 downloads page has an updated copy of the data visualization components (charts and the Advanced DataGrid and OLAPDataGrid). While we have made it easier to view the source (you don't have to run the DMV-source.jar anymore), we still consider these components to be under the Flex Builder license, and the source to be considered "Professional Component Source Files" as described in the Flex 3 SDK EULA. So I hope that clears up the licensing question.

The other concern I've heard raised is that Flex 4 is not seeing many changes to the data visualization components, and therefore folks are worried that Adobe is not investing in them. Data visualization remains a "core competency" of Flex, and we absolutely plan on further development of these components along with supporting partners who have expanded upon them like the ILOG team at IBM. In the Flex 4 time frame we plan on making some improvements to the GroupingCollection, a fundamental piece of the ADG in the hopes of addressing one of the larger performance bottlenecks. However, we chose to take on 2 significant agendas that preempted doing significant work in the data visualization components.

The first is the data connectivity features in Flash Builder; the way we're making it even easier to connect your data from the back end into the data visualization components in the front. We hope that this will make the data visualization components even more accessible for developers, making it simple to get up and running and build powerful data-driven applications.

The other agenda is the introduction of the Spark architecture. As everyone knows, this is a significant improvement to the fundamental component architecture in Flex, but it is too much to bring every component forward into the new model in a single release. While the charting components do not need to be modified significantly to fit well with Spark, the DataGrid (and therefore the AdvancedDataGrid) will take significant effort, and that is work we intend to do in the following release. Knowing that a fundamental re-architecture of the DataGrid is coming, we decided not to make significant investment in the current one for this release other than addressing the most important bugs.

So that's the status and we hope you'll understand and agree with our prioritization. If you've got any questions, feel free to comment here or post to the forums!

The Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 betas have now been out for a few weeks and we're very excited to see so many folks playing with them, asking questions on the forums, and posting examples of what they've done. From the time we first started showing Gumbo we've been monitoring feedback, especially around the experience of using the Spark and Halo components together. While we know that in general using both models together is possible, we've decided that there are a number of smaller things that we can do (many suggested by you) to make the experience that much better for both new and existing users.

We've therefore decided that we need some more time to take your feedback into account, and are going to release a second public beta this fall. This will give us an opportunity to make the enhancements required, and get additional feedback from the community. Given the second beta, we anticipate the release of Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 to move from late 2009 to early 2010.

On the Open Source Flex SDK side, we're planning to host another open iteration meeting in the next few weeks to discuss all of the changes that we're considering. We'll also be looking for feedback on things we can do in our docs and messaging to make sure that users from all backgrounds are successful in adopting Flex 4. Stay tuned here for the announcement of that meeting. And keep using the beta, filing bugs, and communicating with us via the forums!

When: February 10th – 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET / 6:00pm GMT (duration 1 hour and 15 minutes)
Find your time zone here.

Where: via Connect: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/foi/ (Please enter the room as a ‘guest’ using your First and Last name)

We invite you to partake in our iteration kick-off meetings. We’ll be reviewing decisions made in the last iteration and discussing the upcoming iteration – what we’ll be working on and open issues. This will be a chance for you to give us feedback on these items and to interact with the SDK engineering team.

Agenda
10:30am – 11:15am : Flex team discusses past and future iterations
11:15am - 11:45am : Open up discussion to community for Q&A

Guidelines

• Please review the content to be presented (the Open Source site will be updated with this information) and post and vote on questions you may ahead of time here
• We’ll only be discussing the SDK - not Builder, Catalyst, Flash Player bugs, Obama, or Flash on the iPhone
• Please keep feedback relevant to this iteration’s content
• Fx prefix is an ongoing discussion that will NOT be discussed in this meeting and will be discussed via the forums
• If you’d like to dive deep into the implementation of a feature, we’d like to discuss this with you. However, given the time constraints of the meeting, please mention it during the session and we can continue this discussion via the forums.

Thank you for participating in the Flex Community Feedback Forum. We had over 200 individuals attend with numerous questions and comments. We’ll be working to make sure that the hot button items are addressed.

If you were unable to attend the session, the recording is available here.

We hope you will continue this discussion on the forums and that we’ll see you at our upcoming Open Iteration Meetings.

Thanks again, we greatly appreciate your feedback and participation.

Vera

Links to resources mentioned in the session:

Flex Open Source Site

Flex Open Source Forums

Specifications

Bug / Feature Base

Nightly Builds - Flex 3

Nightly Builds - Gumbo

WHEN: January 28th – 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 6:00pm GMT (duration 1 hour)

Come speak with the Flex SDK team to voice your interests and concerns. This session will be an opportunity for the community to talk about the Flex SDK itself and discuss our management of the SDK open source project. Please bring your questions and feedback as the session will primarily be led by you (and could be short if there's not a lot of input).

The meeting will be broadcast via Connect: http://adobedev.adobe.acrobat.com/techweds
** enter the room as a ‘guest’ using your First and Last name **

If you’re unable to attend, the meeting will be recorded and posted on the Flex Open Source site (http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK) afterward.

We look forward to hearing from you!

A new round of specs are posted on the Gumbo site. Check out the revised Gumbo Component Architecture whitepaper, the Gumbo Skinning overview, along with specs on the Range, Track Base, Slider, Spinner, and Numeric Stepper classes.

We are very pleased that Flex 3 has won Best Open Source developer tool for RIAs as part of InfoWorld's Best of Open Source Software Awards.

Help us continue to be the best by staying connected on the Flex Open Source site and contributing in the various ways we have listed.

ASDoc
MXML 2009 (update to MXML)

Enjoy!