I’ve set up a project using Trac (if you don’t know what trac is read here) that allows you to compare the source code of the new beta release of the Flex 3 SDK with the previous Flex SDK 2.0.1 version. This lets you browse all the changes that were made and visually see the differences. I find this very useful when trying to analyze the new release and figure out what the new additions and changes are.

Here’s a link to the main Trac website.

You can view the entire changeset from version 2.0.1 to version 3 here. (Warning: it’s pretty big so it might take a bit to load).

If anyone from Adobe doesn’t like this and wants me to take it down just let me know. I think it’s valuable for the development community, but if you’ve got a legal fever and the only remedy is to yell at me, then I’ll remove it. Email me here: doug@dougmccune.com.

This post discusses the features Ted Patrick blogged on Wednesday: the Advanced DataGrid component, Deep Linking, Resource Bundles for localization, and the Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3.

Advanced DataGrid (I would’ve called it SuperDataGrid)
This is basically what the community has come to call a “TreeGrid”, plus the addition of more control over the headers, and summary rows and cells. It’s certainly a component that has has been asked for like mad. I’ve seen a few versions of a TreeGrid component out there (like the one in FlexLib). As far as I know this component’s a hard one to get right, I know the FlexLib version has quite a few issues, so it’s good to see that Adobe’s been working on a solid version themselves. I’ll be interested to dive in and see how they did it (ie I assume DataGrid as the base, but do they use the Tree control? or did they cook up an independent Tree control for use within the DataGrid? Is the original DataGrid component untouched?). I’ve never seen anyone add summary rows to the DataGrid component, but I’ve heard people request this a lot, so I’m sure this will get a lot of use as well.

I’ve said before that the DataGrid stuff doesn’t get me excited. This is a component lots of people have wanted, so that’s cool, and I bet I’ll find a use for it (like in my AS code analyzer app for sure), but if this never existed I wouldn’t cry myself to sleep. It’s a cool and requested component, but I mean, that’s what we get for UI components? Two layout components and a better DataGrid? I know a couple people on the SDK team, they’re smart, they can make really cool shit (I mean, the Flex 2 SDK was frickin amazing). This is what they’ve been spending their time on since the release of the Flex 2 SDK? Bugfixes and a DataGrid? Being a component developer on the Flex 2 SDK seems like it would’ve rocked. Flex 3 SDK? mm, not so much.

Granted, we’ve had some good components come out of Adobe (or Adobe Consulting) since the release of Flex 2, like the Scheduling Framework, Auto-complete TextInput, Docking Toolbar. And Ely Greenfield has put out mindblowing stuff. So in my ideal bountiful-component world? Take Ely and get him working with Alex Uhlmann and the rest of the Adobe Consulting peeps to crank out components. The amount of stuff they could put out in a year would be amazing. Ely, you hear that? Enough management and planning, stop writing specs, take a pay cut and demotion and start writing code again!

Deep Linking
That’s cool, I don’t know if any of the apps I write will use deep linking, but it’s good that it’s available and easy to use. But most of the discussion around deep linking is about SEO. An important part of deep linking support is that Flex/Flash apps need the ability to present multiple unique URLs to search engines for them to index. The inclusion of deep linking on its own doesn’t address the SEO issue. So just because you might be able to have unique URLs for the different parts of your Flex app doesn’t mean that Google is going to include your URLs in its index. Now I’m not saying that Adobe doesn’t know this, that link at the beginning of the paragraph is Matt Chotin asking the Flex community if deep-linking on its own, without SEO, is still valuable. So clearly Adobe has decided that even though there is still no solution for SEO with Flex apps, they’re going to support deep linking. That’s good and all, but what would have made this a show-stopper is if the announcement was that Adobe had worked with Google to make Flex apps indexable. Now that would be impressive.

Resource Bundles and Runtime Localization
I know this has been often asked for. Basically at every public Q&A session with people on the Flex team that I’ve ever been to (Apollo Camp, 360 Flex, some of the silvafug meetings) someone has asked about localization and multiple language support. So the demand is clearly out there. I don’t have any experience trying to make apps that support multiple languages (what, not everyone speaks English? really?). So I can’t say that this eases a distinct pain of mine, but I know it’s important to a lot of people, so kudos to Adobe for getting it rolled out. It doesn’t make Flex 3 stand out in my book, but I know this feature alone will make the upgrade worthwhile for some.

Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3
This was sort of mentioned in Ted’s previous post when he talked about skinning integration with other CS3 apps. I haven’t tried this out, and I actually have a pretty pessimistic view whenever I hear talk about cross-product integration. But if this works I will probably do a lot more skinning in Flash. A personal aside, I started working with Flash before I started working with Illustrator. I’m not a great graphic designer, but I enjoy design and skinning and all that. I actually like the simplicity of the Flash vector drawing tools. When I skin apps (or even make t-shirts, or stickers, or whatever) I often draw my graphics directly in Flash. Illustrator lovers will probably gasp at the fact that I like drawing in Flash more, but hey, I’m a simple guy. So since most of the vector graphics work I do is already in Flash, that means I can designs skins using the app I’m most comfortably drawing with (as opposed to Fireworks). I don’t do enough skinning work to make this too important, but if the Flex Component Kit works well (I haven’t tried it yet) then this might be pretty sweet for me.

Summary
This feature set is all about the Advanced DataGrid component. This is a component a lot of people have wanted. But I’m about as excited about this one as I was about the original DataGrid or Tree components in the original Flex 2 SDK (that is to say, not excited much at all). I think the main reason I’m so down on the Advanced DataGrid is because I saw Flex 3 as an opportunity for a whole set of new component toys to play with. And so I wonder how the same team of programmers who put together the first Flex 2 SDK can put out an update that includes a whopping 1 new UI component and 2 layout components. This does not include updates to the charting components that will also be included, I have no idea what those will be, maybe I’ll be blown away (although I’m only expecting minor updates to existing charting components).

The announcement that Ted made today about Flex Framework caching on the client is more exciting to me than this feature set. I’ll try to write up my thoughts on that tomorrow when I get time. I think it’s an important feature (although not as important as the Profiler). But I’ve never seen the 500-700k footprint of a Flex app be a show stopper. But anything to get that large SWF size down will give Flex haters a bit less to argue about.

This post addresses the code enhancement features Ted blogged about today. Now we’re getting into some stuff that’s worthwhile.

Compilation
This is huge to me, it’s one of those things that made me hate Flex Builder 2. It fixes a problem that has led me to curse at my computer. So I’m really happy incremental code compilation is coming, but this is something that should have always been in the product (man, I’m harsh today, huh?). Recently I’ve been working on a pretty large Flex app. We’ve got about 8 different MXML apps in the project, each representing a different prototype of the same general application with slight variations. As your app grows, and especially if you have multiple MXML applications, it takes longer and longer to do a build. Yesterday I was in a time crunch to get some updates for this app rolled out. But every time I needed to do a new build Flex Builder would take what seemed like an eternity (I don’t know, maybe not eternity, but it seemed really long). And Eclipse’s memory usage skyrocketed up to well over a gig of RAM. I only made changes in a few classes, and I only wanted to test one of the MXML apps out of the 8 that were in the project. But every build had to recompile each MXML app (yeah, I know you can remove MXML apps from the project’s preferences, but that’s a hassle to always do). So anyway, this will definitely save me time. And when you’re billing by the hour, a minute or two saved each time you build your app adds up to a lot of dollars.

Language Intelligence
I can’t comment on this because I have no idea what implications this has for writing code. He mentions the features this enables (refactoring, code outline, etc), so I’ll cover those features on their own.

Refactoring
This is good, and a lot of people seem to think this is the most important thing in this release (judging by blog reactions and the oohs and aahs when it’s demoed in public). I mean, this is cool, it saves you time when you need to refactor. But I’ve done some pretty intense refactoring and I gotta say that refactoring’s not on my top five list of things I want to see in Flex 3. It’s great that it’s there, and I’m happy to take advantage of it, but I don’t see this as one of the top features in this release. I might totally be the exception here.

Class Outline
I don’t care. I’ve never used the application Outline view, I don’t think I’ll ever use the Class Outline view. It shows all the imports in a class? So? They’re all at the top of the class anyway. It shows all the function and variables? I don’t care, I can control-click on anything I see in a class and jump to where it’s declared, that’s more useful to me.

Code Search
This I find useful. I have often found myself doing a search within a class for every reference to a specific variable or function. I’d almost like to see this code search panel automatically open every time I control-click on a variable or function name. This doesn’t solve a huge pain for me, but I’m sure I’ll use it.

Profiler
THIS IS HUGE. This is without a doubt the single best feature out of this set. Maybe of the entire Flex 3 release (obviously I have to wait to hear what else is included). HUGE. People say they want refactoring… fuck refactoring, I want the profiler. There have been countless times in my Flex development that I’ve wanted this. Every Flex app I’ve ever made could have benefited from having this profiler. This will allow Flex apps to get much bigger and much more complex. We’ll get much more graphic-intensive but still usable apps because of this. When you build a large Flex app you quickly start hitting performance issues. AS3 is damn fast for small stuff, but using the Flex Framework and very complex layouts means the player is doing a ton of layout calculations for any screen movement. Then when you add in component creation and you start creating references to components that you think are being disposed of, but turns out they’re not and the GC doesn’t free those components… it all goes to hell. Very large, complex Flex apps running for days almost always get slower and start eating up more RAM. Making your app GC friendly is difficult when you start building big apps. The profiler will be an essential tool for any developer working on a Flex app of any large size.

Module Support
That’s cool, whatever. I’m still tired from my excitement over the profiler, so these next features aren’t going to really get much love from me.

Multiple SDK Support
I don’t really see this as being very important. I guess the idea is that you can have developers with different SDK versions working on the same Flex app? But really? I don’t see that happening. One thing I do see that’s useful is when a new hotfix or update comes out, this will let you take an existing Flex app and testdrive it with the new update to see if there are any issues. If there are you can easily switch back to using the old version until you figure out how to migrate. That’s useful I guess.

Summary
PROFILER PROFILER PROFILER. This is worth getting the upgrade for. The only other thing in this feature set that I really want is the incremental compilation, but that will just make me dislike Flex Builder less. The Profiler will actually make me drool.

Tomorrow Ted’s going to write about the new components in the SDK. I want new components! But I think this is going to be less than exciting. We’re going to see an enhanced DataGrid, and probably other enhancements to the list-based controls. I hate the DataGrid. I understand why it’s really important to Adobe and why a lot of enterprise business apps need a powerful DataGrid control. But it’s so damn boring. Seriously people, come up with a more exciting way to show your data, don’t just drop cells into a grid. I know you love excel, but we’re working with a platform that can display data in all sorts of cool ways. Enough with the DataGrid.

I would love to see new UI components, but I don’t think we’re getting anything new (I’m hoping I’m wrong tomorrow). He also hints at SQL support within AS3, but don’t we already have an open-source project to do that? I think the framework updates are what I was most excited about when I first thought about Flex 3, only to find out that we aren’t getting a new set of components, just a few upgrades to the boring components. But we’ll see tomorrow.

My amped-up excitement for the profiler has worn off now, but seriously, the Profiler is cool. Like in terms of adding up to a BJ in my mind? Flex 3 is getting closer.

Seeing how I bashed on what I saw as over-hyped PR about the upcoming Flex 3 beta, I figured I would post my thoughts on the new features that Ted Patrick has been showing. Someone asked me to write about whether any of the new Flex 3 features “add up to a BJ in my mind.” Hence the graphic on the right. I’ll try to make that judgment once I hear more about Flex 3. For now, this post corresponds with the first post Ted did on his blog about the Developer/Designer enhancements in Flex 3.

Skin Importing
This is nice, it looks like if you create a single SWF and if you name your assets correctly they’ll get automagically correlated with the Flex components they’re supposed to skin (ie AccordionHeader_disabledSkin gets mapped to the disabledSkin style of the AccordionHeader selector). I assume this is simply a matter of parsing the symbol names in your swf, and not a more magical integration with Flash CS3, but I don’t know. So yeah, this is kinda cool, saves you some time. I’m not too excited but that might just be because I haven’t done an awful lot of custom skinning.

Design View Zoom/Pan
I don’t care. I rarely use design view, and when I do the object snapping always seems to work well enough for me to align stuff correctly. But again, I’m almost never in design view except to check out CSS styling and very basic layouts.

Design Mode support for ItemRenderers
This is pretty hot if you use design view. I question how well this will work with complex custom item renderers. I have a hard enough time trying to get my custom components to draw themselves in design view at all, so I have some serious doubts about whether this will work with complex ItemRenderer components. But I’m sure it will be helpful for simple inline ItemRenderers. Again, I rarely use Design View, so I’m not super excited about this, but I can see why people would be (especially considering the number of ItemRenderer questions that get posted to flexcoders). Some of the most common problems people have deal with data binding in ItemRenderers. If this gives you visual feedback about whether you’ve wired up your data binding correctly in your ItemRenderer then I think it will be useful to a lot of people.

Advanced Constraints
I don’t even know what this means. I’m really looking forward to new components in the SDK, but these don’t get me too excited (that might just because I don’t understand what they really are).

CS3 Suite integration
This is big… if it works. I’ve seen the demo of Fireworks CS3 to Flex skinning and that’s pretty cool. I have no idea what the Photoshop or Illustrator integration means. Not to be overly pessimistic but I have a feeling the answer is that the integration isn’t going to work well enough to live up to the hype. That goes for the non-Fireworks products. The Fireworks skinning integration looks like it might actually work well enough to use on a daily basis. I’ve never been a Fireworks user, but this might be enough to get me to convert.

CSS Outline
I don’t care. I’ve never used the outline view for AS3 classes, I don’t think I’m going to use the outline view for CSS. It’s not like looking at a CSS file is difficult, it presents the information in an almost identical way as the CSS outline view.

CSS Design View
Fuck yeah. This is good. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time. So far I’ve taken two approaches to writing CSS styles for a Flex app.

• Option 1: make changes in a CSS file, save, switch over to my MXML app, switch into Design View (because I only go into Design View for CSS checking), click the Refresh button, find the component I was just styling, check it, then go back to the CSS file and make some minor adjustments.
• Option 2: open up the Flex Style Explorer app and do all my styling there. Then copy/paste the relevant CSS blocks into my CSS file. I remember one day the style explorer site was down for a bit and I didn’t know what to do. I think I got drunk instead of doing Flex work.

Now that all can go away. Thank God. My biggest concern is about whether this will work with custom components. I really want to be able to use CSS Design View for custom styles defined in custom components. Please.

Flex 3 SDK Skinning/Style Enhancements
Nothing here really gets me excited. We get some changes in the programmatic skinning of ProgressBar, DataGrid, and Panel. Maybe I’ve just never tried hard to skin these components and run into any problems.

Summary
For me, CSS Design View is the standout of this group. This will certainly save me time. Nothing else really jumps out at me. The Fireworks skinning integration has the potential to make skinning a Flex app a hell of a lot easier, but just in terms of my personal interest I don’t really care too much.

These features are nice, but this stuff alone probably wouldn’t get me to pay any money for the upgrade. Maybe that’s because I don’t do an awful lot of work with designers who don’t code. Or maybe it’s because a lot of the work I do is more in the custom component realm than the overall app development realm. Or maybe I just don’t like pretty things.

Seriously now, Ted Patrick claims the beta release of Flex 3 will be “the beta of the single best release of Flex yet” and will include “‘game changing’ platform capabilities.” And I guess Ryan Stewart has embraced his new Adobe status and is pimping the upcoming release as well.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m excited and all, but it seems like the PR machines are working a little too hard here. I can’t read a blog entry anymore without it being about either:

• how Flex 3 is going to do my dishes and get me a beer from the fridge
• the ground-breaking ColdFusion beta that I can’t live without
• why Silverlight sucks and how MS wants to buy the world
• Google and Adobe making sweet love with Google Gears

I’ll hold my judgment on Moxie until I hear what Flex 3 will actually contain, but it better be some seriously good shit or I’m going to be disappointed. Like, my world better be rocked… and rocked hard. If I don’t have to change my underwear after I read about Flex 3 then it’s a major letdown.