kuwamoto.org

Hi folks. If you’re planning on attending MAX and have an interest in Zorn, you should check out some of the new sessions that have been added. Some of the smartest people I work with will be presenting.

NJ Jaramillo is a combination UI designer / programming god, who will be presenting about Flex 2.0 UI and layout, and James Polanco, one of the leaders on the Zorn QA team, will be giving a general overview of Zorn.

Ely Greenfield and David George, two of the architects of the Flex framework, will be giving talks, as well as Gary Grossman, who has been involved with almost every aspect of Flash over the years, and is (a) the fastest typist I’ve seen, (b) the fiercest coder I’ve seen, and (c) one of the nicest guys I’ve met.

In addition, we will have a three hour overview session on Zorn which should prove interesting.

Mark and I will be around as well. Hope to meet you at MAX!

P.S. For those who are interested in Dreamweaver (something I worked on for a long time prior to this gig), the new version is fantastic and you should definitely check out some of the talks.

Enough buzzwords for ya?

A long time ago, I remember having a conversation with Tantek Celic about how RSS/tags/etc have started to form a loose taxonomy of information. Tantek calls it the semantic web with a lowercase s. The reason this has so much momentum is because it’s a grassroots effort. Instead of creating a taxonomy the way a librarian would (top down), each person decides how to tag information, and tags tend to coalesce. He later joined Technorati, which just shows how strongly he holds these convictions.

Nowadays, there’s a lot of talk about Web 2.0, web mashups, AJAX, etc., which in my mind are all facets of the same phenomenon: that information and presentation are being separated in ways that allow for novel forms of reuse.
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In the previous part of this challenge, I was asking the question of whether model/view separation was enough for most RIAs, or whether MVC was required. As a concrete exercise, I thought it would be good to imagine building a specific small app, so I picked Ta-da List.

I took some time to sketch out what I think a model/view version of this app might look like in Flex pseudocode. How would an MVC version be structured differently?

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This discussion about MVC in RIAs has made it clear that different people can mean slightly different things when they talk about MVC. Once we got down to specific examples, the differences seemed to disappear.

So let’s get even more specific. Suppose you were building a Flash/Flex version of Ta-da list. What would the appropriate client side architecture be? What classes would you have, with what responsibilities? If you haven’t seen the app before, check it out. It’s a small, convenient app made by the folks who put together Ruby on Rails.

My personal belief is that for an application of this scale, you could build it cleanly without a controller, and that the code may be simpler as a result, but I could be totally wrong. In the meantime, prove me wrong! (or better yet, prove me right!) Tell me how you would build it.

I’ll offer a Macromedia T-shirt (hopefully a Flex/Zorn shirt, although we don’t have any yet…) to the person who contributes the best ideas to this thread.

Full disclosure: If you feel particularly territorial about your ideas or code samples, please be warned that any insights you give may make their way into Macromedia samples / documenation / etc. In other words, please don’t share anything you don’t want us to share with others.

As part of the conversation about MVC, Grant Skinner brought up state management. I believe having centralized state management is critical, although I don’t consider that the same thing as a controller.

Flash based apps tend to have recognizable “locations”. These may include things like a login screen or an index page. Controls may also have states, such as an “up” state and a “down” state. Using a centralized dispatch mechanism for states is a good idea. I don’t think of that as the same thing as a controller, but people seem to mean different things by the word controller…