One of my big peeves with Flash developers is when little shops spend loads of time reinventing the wheel (custom tweening engine anyone?) only to have their very own proprietary code library that the other little shops aren’t allowed to see. In the end, everyone loses because they’re stuck with an amateurish old code base that gets hacked and reworked for every project. It’s the exact opposite of everyone’s favorite buzzword for 2006, Design Patterns. The point is not to create the perfect secret code snippet, everything’s already been done or it’ll soon be knocked-off. The point is to create good work and inspire others.
At my current job, I’m pushing for us to use an open source code library that we can become major contributors to. That way, we gain from everyone’s work and they gain from ours. As such, I’ve been on the lookout for any viable AS3/Flex open source libraries. One that seems to have a lot of promise is FlexLib started by Doug McCune &al. I met Doug and Patrick at ApolloCamp and they were both cool dudes.
Does anyone have any reviews to share of this library or know of others? I’m sure I’ll eventually get around to trying it out myself.
Mims, it was good meeting you at ApolloCamp. And great to hear about your interest in getting involved in FlexLib. I’m not aware of any “reviews” anyone has done on the current FlexLib components. It’s a pretty new project, we launched it just before 360Flex (which is where I think a lot of people first heard about it). So it’s young and small. But we’re trying to build it up (new TreeGrid component was added today from Yaniv De Ridder, and a couple days ago Renaun Erickson added a component).
We’ve got components now from 4 developers, with at least 2 more developers about to contribute soon. A big chunk of the components in there now were mine that I put in for the initial commit.
So if you’ve got some stuff you think might fit into the project, let us know. You can join the google group we set up, or just email me. Once we add some of your code we’ll set you up as a project member and you can update and add new components yourself.
Cool.