Waldo Smeets .com

I’ve spend quite some time during the last few months to do Macromedia Flex development. It’s about time to blog about it.

Learning MXML and the Flex API is an interesting experience, it feels like a mix of going back to the first days of learning HTML (“what was that tag exactly?”), learning the DOM like I used to do when writing DHTML, and going deep into ActionScript 2.0. Did I like it? Yes! Was it difficult? Sometimes.

I hope to post here regularly about my experience and the tips and tricks that I have learned or discovered.

During the long beta cycle (and even before, that’s the previlege of working at Macromedia) I tried to learn the framework in several ways;

• Very often I did write small blocks of code just to analyze how specific code behaves. Very often this was triggered by a small idea that I had or by something that I read in the docs. This really helps you to bring the theory into practice (you always remember something better when I write it down – code – then when I only read it)
• Another way in which I forced myself to learn a lot, was by trying to answer questions that were posted in the newsgroups. Not that I knew the answer all the time, that’s what we have Matt Chotin for ;-). However, by just thinking about a problem that someone else faced, by looking into the code that that person wrote and by trying to find the solution yourself, you really learn the inns and outs of the technology (even if it was only because of the mistakes that you make yourself). The first post I’ll make here will cover some of the things that I learned from the beta newsgroups, just so that you can all learn from it.
• Read read and read. The documentation that comes with Flex is awesome and defenitely is the best time investment you can make to learn it.
• Using the debuggin tools that are available. Not only to debug your code, but also to analyze what MXML is actually ‘translated’ into so that you really know what’s going on.

However, I also wanted to have a real world project. I have started to create a RIA for this blog admin. Not sure when it get’s finished, cause I am distracted all the time by small little features that I want to add. The problem is the desired backend functionality is not yet in the blog system, so I have to create the ‘business’ logic as well 🙁