Welcome, Michael! The feature that you described sounds fantastic. I would love to see the code. We are all volunteers and we each work on what we want to. Kudos to you for telling us what you would like to see so nobody duplicates the effort. What help do you need from us?
Sent from my MOTOROLA ATRIX™ 2 on AT&T -----Original message----- From: Michael Montoya <montoyl...@gmail.com> To: "flex-dev@incubator.apache.org" <flex-dev@incubator.apache.org> Sent: Wed, May 9, 2012 02:07:25 GMT+00:00 Subject: Flex PDF support Hello community, I'm a fellow JavaEE / Flex developer in NYC excited by the possibility of having a hand in shaping the future of Flex. After looking through Vaadin's documentation in preparation to port my company's current portfolio of Flex web apps, I got this sinking feeling as I fessed up to myself - despite all the clamoring around me to the contrary - that no amount of HTML5 can ever hope to replace the breadth, depth and richness currently possible with Flex. I don't want Flex to go the way of the Dodo. So I have resolved to help keep it relevant and help innovate any way I can. As a total noob to open source collaboration, however, I'm still trying to get my footing and figure out how best to contribute. One very general thought is that it would be wonderful if we could develop a native means for viewing PDF documents in Flex. In my experience this has been the Achille's heel of our Flex apps and has led to very kludgy work-arounds using server-side Image Magick to convert the document to images (lately we've been exploring swftools). This is less than ideal for all the obvious reasons... I'm surprised Adobe never addressed this, but it would be wonderful if we could. My other question/concern is this - while Adobe has ceded Flex to the community, isn't Flex virtually useless without the Flash Player to run the compiled bitecode? Am I the only troubled by the fact that Adobe has given us the keys to a Ferrari with no engine. While I applaud their latest features as of Molehill - particularly access to the GPU through AGAL, what's to stop them from pulling the plug on Flash Player development altogether thereby rendering the fruits of our labor utterly useless? While I can certainly envision new and exciting capabilities for Apache Flex, doesn't true innovation require coordination with the Flash VM and hence, player development - not to mention Actionscript? What little time is left over between work and family is very precious to me and I hate to think that my efforts may be in vain. The current dependency to Adobe makes me feel rather exposed. Anyone feel the same or can someone allay my concerns? Sincerely, Michael On May 8, 2012, at 9:25 PM, Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com> wrote: > > > > On 5/8/12 5:21 PM, "Justin Mclean" <jus...@classsoftware.com> wrote: > >> Hi, >> >>> I'm not familiar with any of these technologies. They don't allow for >>> manual configuration? >> Yes the environment variables can be set up so that's not a big issue. >> Downloading the required extra bits would require an extra script (or target >> in extra ant script) to do so. >> > Is that because you think the CI server will need to download the > prerequisites more than once? > > -- > Alex Harui > Flex SDK Team > Adobe Systems, Inc. > http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui >
