WWWWW?

So... I was very excited last week about the idea of starting this blog, and I forgot to introduce myself :-S


Who? This is Marc Baiges, Multimedia Engineer by La Salle Engineering School, Barcelona.

Where? Born, growed up and living in Barcelona, working at Strands.

What? I've been working with Java/JEE technologies for almost 3 years and for the last year I've been programming with Flex. I enjoy working with Flex and spend a lot of time reading about it. So I'll try to write about my daily experience with it, the problems I face, solutions I find, examples I see... everything I think is worth sharing with others.

When? Heheheh, good one... I'll try to do it regulary, as often as I can, I promise.

Why? This is the important one. Why... I can think of many reasons why. Three of them:

• I'd like to make people know about me. Because community is very impotant in our sector. We're asking for help daily in forums, mailing lists, blogs, etc... and I think it's easier for people to get involved in your business when they know something about you, what you do, remember you for trying to help some others time ago, read once an interesting article you wrote... anything.
• I like Flex, as I said before, and like reading about it, evaluating this new graphics library, that other MVC framework... And I don't have so many people to talk about it and feel the need to share it with others!!!
• To practice my English. May sound stupid, but is a very important reason for me. I want to improve it so, any mistake I make, anything that sounds "unnatural", please tell me. I'll be very grateful!

hope to see you around :-)

Flex performance tips

One of the most interesting sessions I assisted in MIF Onsite III was "Flex optimization" by Alberto Alacaraz. He talked about optimizing Flex applications, performance and memory usage, and some tips to achieve it by using the Flex Profiler.

Performance/memory usage are both equally important issues while developing successful applications, but focusing in performance, it's a key aspect when talking about user experience. When working with interactive aplications, the user expects an inmediate response to a button click, or a key press, a drag & drop... and if these events fire any inefficient processes, the overall user impression about the application can be damaged.

Alberto pointed some simple tips to have in mind when coding Flex applications. Very simple things in fact, but I often forget those when coding...

• Remembering ActionScript statements such as "break" or "continue" when iterating in loops can save some precious time. Come on, review ActionScript3.0 statements!
• Bindings in Flex are very powerful, but involve some overhead we must be aware of. They are very useful to ensure we're displaying the latest data in our views, but do we want to notify the view of every change we make over this data? Perhaps notifying sets of changes, between consistent states could be enough...
• The object pool pattern, that a very elegant way to improve object instantiation times.

Here, I try reproduce some of the examples Alberto showed (here the source code):

MadeInFlex OnSite III

Last friday (October 17th 2008) I had the chance to attend to MIF OnSite III, a Flex event that MadeInFlex (the most active Spanish community in Flex) organized in Madrid. It was a single day event.

The scheduling:

• KeyNote, by Enrique Duvós
• Flex Optimization, by Alberto Alacaraz
• Domestika, an online community, by Borja Delgado
• Advanced Architectures Flex/JEE - RIAlity, by Carlos Rovira
• WedTool.com, a Startup in Flex, by Angel Blesa
• Papervision3D for dummies, by Joan Garnet
• The Future, by Joseba Alonso and Xavi Beumala
  

It was the 3rd edition of this event, having attended the previous ones in Barcelona. There's no possible comparison with events like 360Flex or MAX, neither for its size, nor for big announcements. Adobe speakers leave some comments on how great new things will be announced... in future events, like Max.

Anyway, it's a great way to see what's going on close to you, what Flex recipe is cooking the neighbour next door.

For work reasons I missed the "Wedtool" conference, so, a part from that, I really enjoyed Flex Optimization by Alberto Alcaraz , and the one about the close future, with CS4, Gumbo and AIR 1.5. I'll try to reproduce some of the situations Alberto talked about in an upcoming post.

The Papervision for dummies, was really "entry level". I'm not complaining about it, for some reason Joan Garnet had few time to prepare it and did a good job. The Domestika one was perhaps a little out of place, but loved the work they've done in the site redisign.

My overall impression after this 3 events is that the spanish Flex community is not very communicative. I was checking my RSS subscriptions about Flex... and there is just 2 over 40 sites I follow. Man, do we only know how to communicate while in the bar holding a "caña" in our hand??? (I guess is difficult to type in this situation :-P)

I forgot to mention the event was 100% free, so I'd like to thank the organization for its effort and encourage them to keep on working in building community.

thanks MadeInFlex.