Joseph Labrecque

I fist tried Eclipse as a web development IDE a little over one year ago. At the time, I had mostly just stuck with Dreamweaver for all of my general web/PHP/ColdFusion needs. I had heard that the new version of Flex Builder was being built on Eclipse and figured to give it a shot.

I was severely disappointed initially- the IDE was slow, clunky, and configuration was a nightmare. Performing a quick uninstall and returning to Dreamweaver took all of 30 minutes. I tried installing again from time to time, but things were always the same. When JRE 6 was released, this did speed things up quite a bit and at that time I also discovered the Aptana project. Having a “web IDE” install like Aptana was pretty convenient, but I still remained solid with my regular development platform.

With the release of Flex Builder 2, I couldn’t help but use Eclipse more often for MXML editing and so became more familiar with it as a development IDE. I was still annoyed by some small things like no text drag and drop… file not associated with a project could not be opened… line numbering randomly turning itself off… but things were generally better the more experience gathered.

With the release of Eclipse 3.3 [Europa], I have to say that a lot of my misgivings have been taken care of. Not only can you now drag and drop text from line-to-line and edit files outside of the “Project” paradigm, but it is much more responsive as well. With an update of Aptana I notice that it now has an AIR plug to compile and deploy AIR apps built with HTML/JavaScript. I cannot help but wonder what a killer environment Aptana would be with MXML/AS3 support! That would be a serious development platform!

Since reading this announcement on the Google Gears API Blog last evening, I’ve been wondering to myself (from time-to-time) how this would/could/will apply to the Apollo runtime. Apollo’s integrated web engine is WebKit which is the same engine the Safari browser runs on… but Safari is not supported by the Gears API as of yet. Though as stated on the Gears site- it will be.

It is mentioned in that same announcement that Adobe is one of the “industry partners” working with Google on this project. I can only imagine that there will be some base shared technology between Google Gears and the Apollo local database probably in the form of SQLite?

There are three features touted on the Google Gears website that are of interest:

1. Store and serve application resources locally
2. Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
3. Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Point #1 can already be achieved through the Apollo alpha using the integrated File API and point #3, I believe, is possible as well since Apollo apps can be built with AJAX (though I have only dealt with Apollo through Flex and cannot confirm anything specific on that front). So that leaves point #2… this capability within Apollo would be amazing!

“It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes!”

I’ve been aware of scalenine for some time now but haven’t had the chance to really look into the resources provided there until recently. I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to download these themes, pull them apart, and learn from example how to go about authoring a total customization of the Flex interface elements. Customization through CSS is so much nicer than applying attributes to the UI elements themselves. Much cleaner!

I’ve gone into my first little Flex widget to customize the design with what I’ve taken away from this experience and I’m very pleased. I’m only mucking around with the CSS here with no imported image assets and even so… such a change.