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Flex Builder Source Folders Need to Go Back in the Oven

“The pain, the pain…”
– Jonathan Harris as Dr. Zachary Smith in the original Lost in Space

Dr. Smith was famous for whining, and so am I. Here’s my latest: Flex Builder does not work very well with multiple source folders in a project’s path. Probably the worst breakage is that integrated SVN source control (via the Subclipse plugin) doesn’t work inside them (FB-9989). Second worst would be that library projects can’t compile classes from multiple source folders (FB-9988). Yet another baddie: FB-5564: if you use Ctrl-click to navigate to a definition in a class which is in a linked source folder, a new window is opened unnecessarily, as if FB didn’t know that two files were actually the same. All this is too bad, because source folders are a really good solution to another serious problem with Flex Builder, and one that is probably harder for Adobe to fix: poor performance with multiple library projects.

If you’re using Flex Builder on some large applications with a number of library projects, you may have noticed it gets real slow. Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. It’s too bad, because using lots of small-to-medium libraries forces developers to be much more careful about dependencies between packages.

At Allurent, our approach to this problem has been to structure our Flex Builder projects for speed rather than strict dependency checking. We use Ant for all production builds (it builds multiple .swcs for dependency checking), while developers can use Flex Builder for incremental builds while they work on a project, if they want. To get around the big slowdown problem, we create mega-projects that include all the libraries’ source code directly via multiple source paths. While such projects are slow to open and start up, once you build them and warm up Eclipse’s caches they perform quite well.

The big fly in the jam jar — I know it’s usually ointment that metaphorical flies get stuck in, but that phrase gets kind of old, doesn’t it? — is that source folders are kind of semi-functional in Flex Builder. The fact that Subclipse doesn’t treat the contents of source folders as versioned (even if they are) is really frustrating. Maybe some folks out there are frustrated too. If you are please consider voting on the above bugs!

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More about Barcelona

As I mentioned in my previous post, I just returned from a 3-day trip to Barcelona. My wife and I had a truly wonderful time there, and I really have to recommend it as a destination. It has a unique flavor as a city, with a lot of cultural, visual and culinary delights. Three days (with much of them occupied by a conference) hardly makes for a panoramic sense of such a rich place, so I’m just going to set down some of my impressions and experiences without trying to do the place justice.

I’ve put together a small photo album with a few of my favorite pictures from the trip. I’m not going to embed them all in this post, but here’s one emblematic building by the architect Gaudi:

There’s a lot I don’t know about Gaudi, but when I experience his work close-up I see a mixture of iconoclasm and daring coupled with tremendous patience, craft and respect for his materials. And this kind of spirit seems to be present a lot in the city in some form or other. It’s an exciting social nexus where people seem to rush around, shop like mad and party until late at night (just try eating dinner before 9 pm), but at the same time attention is paid to the details of civic life. Things seem to work in Barcelona, and work well.

There’s a great variety to the look of the city. It includes broad avenues with spacious Parisian-style intersections, lined with graceful stucco apartments sporting fantastic wrought-iron balconies. It also has medieval warrens of narrow Gothic alleys, mad modernista Art Deco storefronts, and of course some drab blocky buildings. In most places there are many delightful details and touches: someone cared how something looked. And like my hometown, Chicago, there’s a willingness to be playful with civic art and architecture. Playfulness counts for a lot in my book.

The food is truly great (especially if you like seafood), but I recommend getting away from the main drags and finding somewhere a little less geared to tourist tastes. I have to mention one fabulous dinner we had, at a restaurant called Passadis Del Pep. We heard about it from a friend who used to live in Barcelona and got its address on the web, but had some trouble finding it. We finally located it purely by address — there is no sign out front, just an anonymous doorway with no restaurant visible inside. You have to have faith that something is there and just keep walking further into the building. Eventually we wound up in a wonderfully intimate and friendly space with sort of a cellar-bistro look. There was no menu; the waiter simply started bringing food to the table. Eight small and intense courses of local seafood later (I think there were three different varieties of shrimp, each with its own distinct preparation and taste), we barely managed to get out of our chairs and leave. One of the best meals ever! Not for people who don’t like looking at the faces of the animals they’re eating, though.

I have to give the Barcelona Metro some props on their user interface (and on the fact that the trains run very frequently). On some of the lines, there’s a little linear map over each door showing the stations on that particular route. On one side of the car, the map runs in one direction, while on the other side of the car, the map runs oppositely — that is, it’s flipped horizontally. They apparently went to this trouble so that the map’s orientation would always match the train’s direction of travel. On some other lines, the same linear map has an indicator light set in each station. As the train approaches a station, the light for that station blinks. After the train leaves that station, the light remains on (so you can see where the train has been, as opposed to where it’s going). Good design there!

People were exceedingly friendly and there were no logistical problems on the trip. The city seems safe even in its less inviting regions. The prevailing language is Catalan, not Spanish — but everyone speaks some Spanish, and most people speak some English.

I’ve always wanted to go to Barcelona. It took me decades, but I’m glad I finally made it.

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MAX 2007 in Barcelona: Talk Materials Online

I just got back tonight from a very pleasant 4 day stay in Barcelona, where I spoke at the MAX Europe conference. I’ll be posting soon on some of the touristic and cultural aspects of Barcelona (with several observations on the Barcelona Metro’s user interface); this is just a quick note to let attendees and other interested parties know that the materials from my talks are available.

The sessions I gave this time were:

• The Euro-edition of an interactive panel on Flex Best Practices featuring myself, Steven Webster, Sascha Wolter and Dirk Eismann. This one was considerably less formal than the American version and had a lot more give and take; I feel I was able to apply some good lessons and feedback from the first one. I don’t have notes on the panel, since I was moderating it — you just had to be there!
• A presentation called Practical Patterns in Flex, which I adapted from Jim Echmalian’s talk at 360Flex earlier this year. This features a brand new take on the Model-View-Controller-Service architecture, and highlights the use of specific design patterns to remedy problems of encapsulating responsibility, dealing with asynchronous operations, and gaining access to the “right” controller without using messy singletons. I put together a working sample application in source code form that accompanies the talk.
• Another talk entitled Continuous Integration for Flex with Ant and FlexUnit, originally assembled by Daniel Rinehart for MAX North America.

I don’t have a lot of news about the conference that’s any different from my earlier observations on MAX North America. The food was better at MAX Europe (when there was some), and the sessions were smaller which made them more intimate. However, as a number of speakers noticed, people ask many fewer questions during the session in Europe — but more of them come up afterwards to talk.

Like the Chicago MAX, this conference was situated in a part of town where there are basically no amenities or activities besides hotels and the conference center. And unlike Chicago, there was a distinctly seedy feeling to the neighborhood once outside the immediate neighborhood of the conference. But… it was really easy to get into town on the Metro and see the sights. Barcelona is a truly wonderful city: more on that later!

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UrlKit 0.70 with various fixes and Flex 3 Support on Google Code

I’ve finally moved UrlKit over to Google Code, in the course of which I applied a number of contributed bug fixes (thanks to Tom Ortega and Cyprian Kowalczyk for their help with IE and Opera). It now lives on its very own UrlKit Google Project Page complete with bug database, wiki, browseable SVN repository, and everything that an open source project ought to have. I also did a bunch of work on build scripts to make it much easier to build, test and cut new distributions.

Apart from these fixes, the other main work that took place in 0.70 was the introduction of support for the new Flex 3 deep linking features provided by BrowserManager. Basically, the Flex 3 framework takes care of all the browser-dependent Javascript history support for UrlKit, which is great because I absolutely hate working on that part of it! In this scenario, UrlKit provides the URL parsing/generation logic on top of the basic, unadorned deep linking support you get with Flex 3.

I ran into a bug with Flex 3, unsurprisingly since it’s in Beta — the BrowserManager interface appears not to work in a key case (although I think it used to). This bug is logged as SDK-12955 if you care about such things — and you should, since you can boost the likelihood of it getting fixed by voting on this bug!

By the way, this is the first time I’ve used Google Code personally, and I must say it’s a breeze. And I feel so much better about the project, knowing that people consuming open source projects expect the kind of features that Google Code and Sourceforge offer as a minimum. I wish it had been around when I first hosted the project (Sourceforge was there, of course, but I’m glad I was lazy, I mean I’m glad I waited.)

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Adobe MAX 2007: Highlights, Shout-outs, Brags

I spent a good part of the last week in the Chicago area, attending and speaking at Adobe’s MAX conference along with my colleague Daniel Rinehart. It was a great show this year, with a lot of excitement surrounding the new technologies and concepts on display, particularly AIR, Adobe’s new desktop application technology that blends the capabilities of Flash, HTML and PDF.

A lot of great stuff was shown at the conference, and many folks have blogged the details well (Daniel for one) so I won’t bore with another repeat of it all. There were a number of highlights, including Thermo (code name for a forthcoming design tool aimed at Flex UIs that has some powerful capabilities for designers, allowing them to seamlessly move from comps to a “real” app in small, simple steps of refinement). I was also impressed by the move towards breaking out VOIP/collaboration capabilities (like those found in Adobe Connect) into separate Flex components that could be deployed in any application. I think Adobe is moving in a smart way to make their stuff more open and more invention-friendly so that developers can use their technologies as a springboard, not a black box.

Of course, I have to give big props to my friends and former colleagues at Virtual Ubiquity, the creators of the Flex-based word processor Buzzword. At MAX it was announced that their company was acquired by Adobe, and little wonder. Buzzword is going to rock Word, OpenOffice and Writely/Google Docs, and what better vehicle to propel Adobe into the online-productivity-app world?

This show was particularly exciting for me because Adobe Chief Architect Kevin Lynch demoed my company Allurent’s “Desktop Connection” for Anthropologie as part of the keynote on the first day. We think AIR is a really promising vehicle for platform-independent rich media applications on the desktop, and at Allurent we’ve been busily prototyping and working up ideas on how to exploit its best features. Desktop Connection is a kind of digital brochure, intended as a premium shopping experience for valued Anthropologie customers. It’s an AIR app that can be used either online or offline (since it comes with data for the whole catalog plus a bunch of preloaded media).

The feature that got the most audible reaction from the audience (and the most subsequent queries from developers and designers at the show) was the search-by-color feature:

The shopper can click on any point in a color wheel, or in a pixel of an image dragged in from the desktop or a browser, and the app displays a cluster of products with nearby colors, grouping similar hues together in the display. Although I don’t get much time to hack these days, this was a feature that I personally conceived and coded up myself, so that made it extra gratifying to see the reception from folks at the show!

Many developers and designers at the show came by the AIRPark (a set of barren white metal picnic benches on an Astroturf rectangle, in case you’re wondering what that might mean) to compliment us on the great-looking app and ask us how we implemented this feature. In case you’re one of them, well, the non-secret part of the sauce is this: apparel manufacturers typically create tiny “color swatch” image files that are used to convey color choices on their website. We take the average color values of these swatches, transform them into HSV (hue/saturation/value) triples and put them into our database. Then we build a special index based on a perceptual notion of “color distance” (check out color spaces on Wikipedia if you’re interested), and use that for a fuzzy match to the target color. The results are then sorted in a simple way to place similar hues near each other — for instance, in the example above, you see some orange items placed together although the target color was a shade of red.

Oh yeah, and my panel on Flex Best Practices went pretty well. I wanted there to be more blood, guts and arguing; in the end I think I was too polite and went easy on the contestants panelists. But at least the audience got to hear a bunch of contrasting, dissonant opinions on basic questions. I’m going to have to make Barcelona a real WWF-style smackdown. Hope to see you there!

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