Flex My Day Flex Architecture Playground

Hi all ;)

I just got back from San Francisco where I've had a great time. This city is fantastic. I really wish I didn't have to leave, actually.

Back in France, I'll be giving another eSeminar for Adobe on internationalisation in Flex application, next Friday, called Les stratégies de localisation d'une application Flex.

We'll talk about all sorts of things concerning translation and how to prepare your Flex / AIR apps for it.

You can sign up here to attend the seminar.

I'll be in San Francisco from June 13th till June 22nd. Just in case you're wondering, this is not a business trip, and I have no plan to move there (yet ;) ).

However, if you'd like to meet me there, feel free to contact me via my contact page.

I'll be giving an eSeminar for Adobe France this friday. My goal is to give an overview of the main concepts regarding Flex architecture. I'll mainly focus on MVC and discuss the use of architecture frameworks.

This is a french speaking event, so be warned ! ;)

Abstract (french):

Les fondamentaux d'architecture d'une application Flex

Today, I released the version 0.9.6 of my Flex code generator (see here for the release notes), almost two months after I had first planned to deliver version 1. I'm deeply sorry about that, and I think I owe you some explanations.

If you're a Cairngorm user - which is probably the case if you're a regular reader of this blog - then you'll probably want to know more about Universal Minds' Cairngorm extensions. To put it in a nutshell, it's a set of classes that go on top of Cairngorm (ie it's not a modification to the original Cairngorm code) to improve this architecture framework.

As far as I know, its goal is to adress many, if not all, of Cairngorm known shortcomings, such as :

• Reduce the number of classes

PureMVC's manifold project is a a website and a trac based repository for community powered demos and examples. So it's a great place to get to learn PureMVC, and develop new utilities for the framework too.

I'm very happy to announce the latest release of my Flex Code Generator, which is quite a big update. Besides support for AIR 1.0, it also adds very important new features, such as .NET C# support.

FCG is an AIR app which parses your remote services files, and creates the corresponding base code for your Flex application, using either Cairngorm or PureMVC. You can learn more and download it here.

In the previous part of this series, we've seen how design patterns could help us design a Flex Application. In particular, we've learned that it's considered good practice to divide our application into three parts : The Model, the View, and the Controller.

In the previous parts of this series, we've seen that a Flex client can be considered as the View layer of a RIA MVC-like architecture. Among other things, this means that it has to be as independent as possible from the application server's implementation. Ideally, a Flex client should be able to switch from a service to the other as smoothly as possible. The only dependencies it needs to have is to the Service API, which, as we know, may return so-called Value Objects.