Wish list for Apache Flex

[Cortlandt Winters <co...@cortwinters.net>]

Hi Jeffry,

Hopefully this gets added to the list in the right way as I'm cutting and
pasting from reading the search archives.

Incidentally, we should include instructions on how to search the archives
on the home page for the project, it's very difficult to locate
instructions, in the end I had to just guess and go by trial and error, the
exact same folk who will ask questions that have already been answered are
the ones that won't go to the trouble of guessing how to do it.

Anyway I can think of a number of cases where dynamic states would be
useful. Largely to cover cases where during the lifetime of an application
the amount and type of data will grow to very different dimentions.

Say it's a traditional photo viewer app. The basic use case is that someone
is viewing one set of photos that they've uploaded and you show them
thumbnails. once they've loaded 20 or 20 photos, maybe you add a scrollbar
and change the layout some, A year later they have hundreds of photos and
you want a totally different view. five years down the road they have 5000
photos to browse.

Yes you could define all of these cases up front with different declarative
layouts, but what if in addition to photos the user can store a dozen
different other kinds of things, and some of those things they want to be
able to tag and group in unpredictable ways?

In this case where no one user is likely to choose the same set of things
to do, you can either add an exponential number of layouts to your
declarative interface, all of which are being typed in and compiled even
though a slight number are being used by any one user, or you can code it
with some rules of thumb and dynamic states.

In response to Carlos's original post I'd put 4 things on my wish list for
flex 5 to be successful.
1) The remaining important spark components (thanks to adobe for committing
to this)
2) a simple "kitchen sink" app that uses all the components and transitions
to test skins with
3) two or three good looking professional spark skins
4) A skinning tool for spark components similar to the old Flex style
explorer.

After that my three nice to haves would be
5) multidimentional / hierarchical states
6) Dynamic states,
7) A manager for saving view states in lso's

I would worry about replacing the spark architecture with zippy mobile ones
after that.
Mobile is important and is getting all the buzz, but there are many
applications that will always work better with a mouse, a keyboard and a
large screen. That's what the Flex framework was designed for and that is
it's natural niche, though I have total faith that a simplified version can
be made to fit the mobile market as well.

Anyway thanks for asking.

Do you have a use case for dynamic view states? I can honestly say I've
never been limited by the current implementation.

In the Flex 3 era you could define states on the fly; but it could be a
pain. I have never dug into the underpinnings of the Spark State system,
though.

On 1/9/2012 11:37 AM, Nick Collins wrote:

* Dinamic View States

we have fully support of "dinamic *skin* parts" in Flex 4 and work great,
but one thing we need too is "dinamic view states". Right now view states
need to be declared in the AS3 class and in the *skin*. So this is all very
"declarative". We need the capability to create states on the fly and let
other parts handle this dinamic view states (transitions,...). Without
this, view states are a bit limited.

-- Jeffry Houser Technical Entrepreneur 203-379-0773

-- http://www.flextras.com?c=104 UI Flex Components: Tested! Supported!
Ready!

-- http://www.theflexshow.com http://www.jeffryhouser.com
http://www.asktheflexpert.com

-- Part of the DotComIt Brain Trust