philduba.com

First, the presentation started off with an introduction to CIM. CIM is essentially Comcast's web development business. It has been around for a few years, and was responsible for comcast.net and Comcast Express, as well as a few others. The sites built by CIM relied heavil on Adobe's Flash and subsequent Flash Player rendered content for configuration and presentation of media. CIM used its own internal framework that allowed for, sometimes, up to 80% resuse of AS2 logic across its various applications. They also primarily use a Java backend for data persistence and delivery.

Next, the presentation delved into new features and changed features in AS3 compared with AS2. What made this comparison a little different from others I have seen was that the list was geared towards the Flash IDE and developing with that vs. developing an application with Flex. Some of the features/differences Arpit highlighted were:

• New ActionScript Virtual Machine - improved performance
• E4X and RegEx support
• New DisplayList architecture
• For Flash, new UI objects of Shape and Sprite - again, something I hadn't heard about but is applicable to Flash developers
• Improved graphics API
• Event bubbling - this is a cornestone of Flex but is also available when developing in Flash
• New datatypes like XML, XMLList, ByteArray
• Some class/method introspection of both the class in questions and its parent
• Ranges go from 0 to 1 for things like transparency and alpha
• Private variables and functions are now truly private and are inaccessible outiside of that class
• Properties no longer need the "_"

Again, I know some of these items are listed in other presentations and in blog entries, but it was interesting to hear them explained with a Flash slant as opposed to just a feature list when presenting Flex to ColdFusion or Java developers.

The next topic was a quick demo of the Fan itself. The fan is a Video Player application not unlike YouTube in its underlying idea, just with syndicated content and not user submitted content (at least that was my impression). The current version of the Fan is 3.x as Arpit was unsure what the exact "." version of 3 it was.Again, it is a completely Flash-based application written using the Flash IDE and ActionScript2. It was built using an in-house framework and contains over 74,000 videos. That's pretty impressive and shows what Flash can do. The next release of the Fan, version 4, was built exclusively using the Flex framework. Whereas previous versions have a circular interface, version 4 is tabular in design. Arpit mentioned there was also work on a circular version to be consistent with the previous releases of the application. In my opinion, go with the tabular interface. It looks more like a media player interface, gives the developers more room to place content, and doesn't look as cramed as the circular interface. The circular interface defintely has a "cool factor" but usability wise, I'd stick with the grid/table like setup. Version 4 consists of a few basic components like a List, TabNavigator and a TileList as well as a custom component for delivering the video content and applies their own framework for handling events, data binding, etc.

Next, Arpit went into why CIM had chosen Flex for this application. This section was probably the most beneficial as it shows why a larger, media-savy company like Comcast would choose Flex. First, there were goals for version 4 that needed to be addressed:

• Business Goals
  • Create an application that was configurable, extendable, and skinable
• Developer Goals
  • Faseter development cycles with less code
  • Documentation, both self-documenting as well as overall application documentation
  • Ability to perform unit testing and test driven development
  • Apply versioning and source control

CIM felt that these goals were met with AS3 and the Flex framework. Specifically:

• ActionScript3 Decision Factors
  • Creates a ligher SWF
  • More control as the developer has visibility into underlying classes - all Flex components are AS3 class files
  • Fan application is around 300KB
• Flex Decision Factors
  • Tons of pre-written components
  • Extensive, easy-to-use layout management
  • Data binding
  • Both compile-time and runtime skinning
  • Module framework as of Flex 2.0.1
  • 80% of functionality needed was in the framework itself
  • All Flex components are written using the drawing API, there are no set shapes

I didn't know about the last bullet, but apparently this has a great performance benefit as well as helps to keep the size of the SWF down. The other bullet above that was emphasized was the ability of Flex to perform Data Binding as this is something that is extremely difficult if not impossible to do in Flash itself. He also has a blog post with more details on this topic.

Arpit concluded his meeting with a Flex overview. He examined the UIComponent itself, gave the primary makeup of it and its lifecycle. He also performed a quick demo of building a Flex applicaiton. He also talked a little about the workflow CIM was using to build, test and deploy the application. CIM uses Ant to build the Flex SWF file. Apparently there is a tool by Adobe to help do this? They use Subversion for source control. He also mentioned that CIM was focusing on test driven development and had begun using FlexUnit extensively to test its AS3 class files but was struggling with finding a way to test the UI portion of the application.

Overall, the presentation was good. I believe most folks there got something out of it. The makeup of the group was mostly Flash developers with a number of designers and 3 of us ColdFusion developers. I think I would have probably gotten more out of it if the talk centered on how to build large scale Flex applications, how one goes about architecting or what decisions need to be made. I felt the section on why Flex was chosen was the most beneficial to me. The other parts were overviews of Flex itself that I had seen before except this time they were presented from a Flash developers point of view as opposed to a ColdFusion developer's. Also, there is a new Flex user group for Philadelphia. I am excited to see this group starting up and hope to attend a number of their meetings. Finally, CIM itself is hiring so go to their site and click on the link in the "News" area.