I’ve been playing with Flex and Apollo this weekend, trying to put together a sample application for my upcoming talk at the London Open Hack Day. Previously I had been using the DHTML capabilities in Apollo to tinker with the platform, but there are some things that seem to be easier to access from Flex (the HTML control, for example). Plus, everybody likes learning something new…right?
Flex is an interesting platform. You’ve got an XML templating language backed by ActionScript (close relative to JavaScript). Basically, you’ve got Adobe XUL as far as I can tell. The objects available are a little different, but the gist of it is the same. I have no idea how the performance characteristics of the two compare, so I can’t really speak to that. But for the most part, developing in Flex has been pain free. I’ve had a couple of issues tracking down documentation for some ActionScript classes. The set of documentation that came with the Flex/Apollo SDKs was missing information on some classes that I later found in the online documentation (the mx.rpc.http.HTTPService, for instance). Also, I wouldn’t have expected to look under an RPC package to locate the class I need to use to make HTTP calls, so that took a bit of searching to track down.
Now that I’ve got some of the initial investigation taken care of, my rough plan is to get an Apollo Flex application working in time for my talk. I already had a bunch of PHP sample applications, which is nice to have. But it’ll be cool to have something new up my sleeve, especially if I can satisfy some of the desktop developers.
Better be careful Ryan, before you know it you will get hooked and be joining us over in the web messenger team. Won’t be the first time it’s happened (aka happened to me).
Ha…we’ll see about me getting hooked. I haven’t done enough in Flex yet to get to that point.
oh, the shame of posting an unrelated comment on a blog. I never thought I’d stoop to this but ….
… my yahoo email server is running super-slow, and it’s been doing so for 2 days now. Logging into other yahoo accounts on the same computer is fast, but when I log into my account Yahoo Mail drops to a sad, limping pace. Loading the UI often times out, and when the UI does load up, view messages and replying often results in the horrid “there was a problem with your message. Please try again!”. I’ve been using Yahoo Beta for more than a year so I know this is completely uncharacteristic.
And furthermore, I’ve long ago lost faith in contacting any sort of support email address at Yahoo. So I’m beginng you now.
Help me Ryan Kennedy, you’re my only hope.
(PS, I’ll buy you a pint for your troubles, I’m local to Yahoo!)
Hanford…we’re working on some performance issues with the farm you’re on. Sit tight, smart folks are working on it!