Hi, I would want to share my thoughts about what changes would like to see in forthcoming Apache Flex releases (far beyond 4.6.1 that would bring nothing new AFAIK and will be only serve to put the project in the new Apache rails). I'm referring to Apache Flex 4.7, 4.8, 4.9...and so on.
This is only my opinion and as I said I can't help right now in this issues until I get the time to support Apache Flex with my own work, so it's only my desired changes or new features that I would like to share here to give you some points that I think it would be great to have in Apache Flex: * 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. * AOP With all new avances in this field in the last year (see James Ward / Michael Labriola -Planet of AOP's or Swiz 2 beta AOP feature), I think Flex should provide AOP in its core framework. We need to make it more transparent to the end user and stablish the preloading hooks to instrumentalize the classes when we load the bytecode in order to be able to change that code before it loads in the AVM. I think this is completly a Flex framework responsability. * Flex Core refactor (SystemManager, Managers -PopUpManager,...-) The Flex core framework has many out date code that brings many problems nowadays due to monolitic code or poorly designed code. This is normal in a framework that has now 6-7 years (I talking since Flex 2 since Flex 1.x was AS2), and has code from that period. Today we know more techniques and things evolved so we should refactor many internal things that today are obsolete and are limiting the way to growing and introduces several bugs. I'm referring to all the code that glues all the framework: SystemManager, PopUpManager, and so on... * Maven support I commented this already, but as I think this is really importante to succed in the enterprise market (and this is the main Flex use case) I state this again... Maven support, Gradle support...are really important if we want Flex to survive. We can't handle huge applications repositories if we don't have this kind of tool that ensure that our builds are well formed and constructed with the right external and internal library versions. * Metada Evolution and DI frameworks support Metadata should continue to evolve and support current DI frameworks like Swiz or Parsely. This is some of the things I list here and now, but I think I would come with more as I have time. And you? what are the things that you would want to see in Apache Flex (change, new features,...) , I think this kind of thread is needed now that the list are working for a week or so... I think we need to start to see some future horizont, although the first step would be to get the source code in Apache, and all initial commiters taking over the project to generate the 4.6.1 initial version). What do you think? Make sense this key points proposals for future Apache Flex evolution? Thanks! -- Carlos Rovira Director de Tecnología M: +34 607 22 60 05 F: +34 912 35 57 77 CODEOSCOPIC S.A. <http://www.codeoscopic.com> Avd. del General Perón, 32 Planta 10, Puertas P-Q 28020 Madrid
