TurtleFusion

Well it's been a while since my last post but I have to admit I have been busy since I was last here. I've been working hard on the application I was talking about in my last post and will go on about that much more later - probably in my next post - but for the last few days I've actually been in Flex2 training in London, which has opened up a whole new can of worms/world/indigestion/potential headaches/solutions for me to deal with.

One of the changes that is being proposed for our application is to bring some Flex2 functionality for a better user interface experience during their use of the reporting part of our application.  From what I've read about Flex it seemed like a soun idea that would increase the application response time and add to the user experience - although this was all based on a caveat of deeper research and actual training that would allow me some knowledge of what this integration would take and what it would really give us in means of benefits to our application.

So far I've learnt a lot in class - Flex is a really easy and, dare I say, 'cool', design tool, that I can see would cut down the design time of your interfaces by quite a signifigant time.(well for us still stuck in the dinasour age of actually coding our report interfaces)  It also does have a lot to be said for doing so much, what I call 'user decision calls' , on the client side cutting down the server interaction hits signifigantly. FlexBuilder is also a great tool to use and I've really enjoyed using it as an IDE - something that I think will help spur me on with future Flex project development.  However, there is a lot of things that are still giving me the 'deer in headlights' syndrome everytime I go home and think about what world I've just been introduced into.

For a strict CF developer, Flex has opened up the whole Actionscript can of worms for me to learn - which really isn't that bad a thing in my world, as I've been thrown new technologies to learn before with little warning and little time to do it. 

Seeing how great FlexBuilder seems to be I'm all for looking at Eclipse as an editor - CFEclipse that is - to start using as my own IDE. Two problems with this is that there still seems to be a lot of problems with Eclipse (although I'll try it anyway) and I have to say that it's given me a certain amount of resentment against Adobe that they would take the base of an Open Source product and build such a great plug in for it and then charge you $700 for it! Somehow it doesn't seem right!

Flex2 is so new (using Actionscript 3 and Flash 9) that there isn't a lot of resources for it in the form of books to buy although I have bought the rough cut books on the subjects from O'Reilly and they're pretty good.

The training has been good - although there are three more classes offered and the data services intergration - one I really need - is a seperate class and only really touched on in this beginning three day class.

 To be honest I don't know what to say - I'm still in class and need to digest the hangover that I'm still sufferring from, a hangover given to me by a bad mix of knowledge and future expectations.

Does it ever get better being a lone developer......