Somewhere down the road I'm going to be needing to implement a task-tracking Calendar. Initial thoughts lead me to consider Simple Tasks (http://extjs.com/blog/2007/06/29/building-a-desktop-application-with-ext-air-aptana-and-red-bull/) and/or perhaps Goggle's Calendar API.

Would be very interested to see a demo of your Calendar.

tx

Many thankx for that Philip - great overview. This answers kouri's question regarding the relationship between the quote/unquote out of dateness of AppSkeleton. It's not so much that anything in AppSkeleton is deprecated by PureMVC v2 so much as that the technique used in the latest version of AppSkeleton has since been packaged into the StartupManager utility.

The 'StartupAsOrdered' demo illustrates the problem of monitoring the loading of dependent objects and less so the process of loading assets in the more conventional (media element) sense. Since I'm going to be working on asset loading handling very soon, I'll post a demo that focuses on managing a dynamic list of .swfs.

I'd suggest that AppSkeleton be updated to reflect the same functionality that it currently has but employs the StartupManager Utility so as to avoid kouri's understandable confusion.

Backing out to a big picture for a moment - Application startup being such a huge part of the process we are really lucky to have this utility. Philip's call for others' experiences with it bears amplification. If such information could be gleaned from server logs, it might be interesting to see what happens if an email could be generated to all users who've downloaded the utility asking that folks share their reactions.

Here's one of mine, wouldn't it be reasonable to build in the means of logging 'failure to loads'? Understanding that it's close to trivial to handle this at the given proxy - it sure seems that everyone interested in using the utility is going to be intensely interested in  logging failures.

I'm digging into the API docs to see if I can bring in some of the relevant info from this and previous threads in a useful way.

thx
--steve...

I'd be in a position to to contribute some as I get a better understanding. In the interest of consolidating those handful threads that developed while the AppSkeleton morphed to include the StartupManagerProxy which is the foundation for the utility. I think part of documenting it would be greatly helped if someone with a deep knowledge of that process gave us a digested version of how things evolved the way they did and what precise hurdles it meant to solve.

I'd be happy to carry the ball another 10 yards or so on this project.

thx
--steve...

I does help...thankx much.

The problem is getting my head around the division of labors involved. A view looks to a controller for it's info but it looks as though in Ent's code the view (dataitemRenderer) is poking directly into the model.
>>
The set data function determines which state to use by looking at the value of instock:
      override public function set data( value:Object ) : void
      {
         super.data = value;
         
         if( data )
         {
            if( data.instock == "yes" )
               currentState = "";
            else
               currentState = "NoStockState";
         }
      }
>>

Just finished reading Peter Ent's itemRenderers: Part 4: States and Transitions (http://weblogs.macromedia.com/pent/) outlining a really clear way to handle a lot of what my menus' buttons have to deal with - state and showing or hiding other elements depending on that state.

But the renderer as presented in that specific demo seems impossible to implement in Purely MVC fashion. Is it a matter of breaking the different code elements to respective roles? As presented it's soooo nice and tidy.

Do we have itemRenderers exhibited in any demos?

thx
--steve...

I never use the expression panel.

What do you use to inspect objects while debugging?

The 'show inaccessbile' property works...thx.

While playing with the AppSkeleton I've set a breakpoint on SplashScreenMediator's handleNotification so as to watch the incoming notifications. I've created watch expressions on 'note' and on 'ApplicationFacade.LOADING_STEP'. Neither object will display a value in the 'Expressions' panel. In fact, ApplicationFacade.LOADING_STEP goes so far as to say No such variable: 'ApplicationFacade' .

Sure seems like i should be able to inspect the ApplicationFacade - much less see the value of one of it's constants. How am I looking at this wrong?

thx
--steve...

Check the last half dozen messages or so. Seems Saffron will not be making it to Flex anytime soon, if at all.

Curious to see handling of dynamic resource lists. For example, an app where a search has returned a list of jpgs. Code won't know the names on the list but needs to track which fail - when all have loaded, etc.

Something like:

public function DynamicProxy( rName:String ) {
  var resourceName:String = rName
   super( NAME + '_' + resourceName );
}

mny thx
--steve...

Looking for a quick overview of where things stand with the multi-core version.

How do we go about using the startupmanager utility. Is a port to the multi-core package required / already underway?

The version of the Best Practices  & overview docs aren't yet referencing the Multiton...will these documents update or will an independent paper be published?

And a quick question about appropriate usage of Multiton verion...

Effectively all the development I'm involved with will make use of nested and or sibling-level PureMVC objects - e.g. a top-level menu (based on PureMVC) can cause change of view stack to bring up a slideshow also based on PureMVC. My life is easier by just focusing on the Multi-Core version, right? Or are there other considerations to take into account? From the client-side point of view, what's the functional difference?

thx
--steve...

I'm curious how this app is working for you in the last couple weeks since posting - the online demo seems to have good usability and performance features as far as the previewer/selector goes...have you found resolution with your concern?

This and ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns are already in my library, it's just the applying of this into real world applications that i now need to master.

I'm in exactly the same boat...i think it'd be really helpful to see screen captures of Flex adepts as they step thru a given set of tasks like debugging, project configing, how do they approach implementing or extending (or implmenting _and extending) other objects.

Implicit in your original question is the offer of $$ for mentor services...me too. I'm betting if we solicited we'd find at least a handful of other like minded folks in the same boat. If we pooled our bucks we might be able to attract the attention of the gurus....or as we used to pronounce it in Missouri - ga roos'

Actually, AS3 Design Patterns would make for a killer study guide.

The release notes for MultiCore haven't been fully updated but the version.txt file for it has a TBD list which includes a removeCore method.

Thus the same concept applies for removing commands, proxies, metiators or entire cores.

That will likely be done this week.

-=Cliff>

Any thoughts on the sort of alterations will be required of the existing AppSkeleton Demo? It'd be instructive to see comments in code from a before/after perspective.

I'm not sure if the WebORB/.NET code generation will be doing anything more than generating
the PureMVC client side code.

At this point (the way i understand it) there's only basic service connection code in the PureMVC idiom.  But the WDLM tool is producing some fairly verbose C# CRUD stubs. At risk of suggesting yet another code-branch, it might be worth thinking about targeting the newly released WebORB .net version (newly free-to-use as well) as a discrete port in the same manner as AS2 and Rails.

Seems to me that WebORB represents a really unique creature in the scheme of things by it's very 'MVC-ness'. It can process Object Models for both Flash client-side stuff and server-side code, be it Java, .NET, PHP, and so on  - allowing any of the supported backends platforms interact with Flash/AIR clients via AMF3 - in either direction via messaging no less.

I suspect PureMVC's current developer community is mostly Flash-based folks who have significant interplay with database-based applications - we have to integrate client-side Flash media with enterprise or mashed-up server-side stuff. WebORB's developer community even more so. The overlapping interests to a tighter integration seems possibly powerful.

But that question 'what does puremvc look like on the server side' is yet to be answered by a demo. Server platfom possibilities so far are Java, C#, PHP, (Python and ColdFusion are still being worked on, and I'm not sure how far along they are at the moment). But beyond porting, no one has made the leap to doing a server side demo yet.

It's really exciting, though, because there are so many things that can be done with it.
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Have you had a chance to explore the new capabilities of IIS 7. The ability to create IIS extensions that are native at the server/os level with .net code should produce some interesting possibilities.