Ok. I'm totally willing to believe you and to think that I'm missing something here but I think you have to explain that a little bit more. What kind of apps were these? Were they super detailed subcomponents? Or was a combobox something that needed an item renderer? What other UI set are you comparing them with?
Or to put a hard number on it how big were these projects? Two people? ten? or more? I will admit straight out that most projects that I've worked on had one Java or Coldfusion guy, one db guy, myself and if we were lucky, a part time graphic designer. But I just spent 18 months getting very familiar with the spark architecture and an old app that we wrote 6 years ago with mx components has just had some major new features added to it and I'm amazed at how easy it has gone with the exception of design view in 4.6 totally not working with a 3.2 code base. I remember that it was a pain to try and figure out what was a style what was a skin, etc. - there were a lot of properties to keep track of. That part was definitely trouble. But point me to a better set of standard ui components and make the case for them, because then we can emulate them. I've used a lot of ui components and these were the best in many ways that I can think of. How did you like awt or swing or the microsoft native component sets? Did you use the silverlight components at all? Tcl did the job? Did spark solve your problems? Please tell me how removing the ability to change simple things like label positioning and styles, base colors, enabled something to solve your problems? Things can always be better, but what then, in your mind is the gold standard that we should strive for? Because in my experience, the mx components were the best out of the box stuff that I've been able to work with. The sole caveat was that it was such a mish mash of css, native vectors and embeded images that it was tough to figure out which way to go to for a particular idea. But that's practically a documentation issue really. You had to recompile the whole sdk to add minimal functionality? Please elaborate. But more importantly point us to the promised land because I'm obviously missing some horizon here that I need to know about. On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 11:18 PM, Michael A. Labriola < labri...@digitalprimates.net> wrote: > > >the mx components were very well designed and complete and (though > complicated) hit a nice sweet spot between many trade-offs. > > I do agree that it was often about what types of apps you were building, > however, just to provide another perspective, the mx components were > neither well designed nor anywhere near a sweet spot for the apps I was > building. They were clunky, bloated, untestable messes that required > copying and pasting gobs of code or recompiling the whole SDK to add > minimal additional functionality. Every day we had to invoke an escape > hatch to do the work we needed. > >
