Preface
I attended and spoke at the 360 Flex conference in San Jose this year. Before the high fades away, I wanted to post what I learned last week for a few reasons. First, to share with others. Second, to share for those who didn’t attend, but might if they feel they’d gain something from it. Third, a growing number of Flex devs, albeit really small, feel they don’t gain much from conferences. I wanted to show a potential counterpoint to this in hopes it’ll convert them back.
Back in Flex 1.5, I created a simple DebugWindow that was 1 class, and worked inside of Flex apps. Â I don’t like a lot of complexity, and the fact I just needed to drop 1 class in my project, and write 2 lines of code to make it work was something that no others delivered on. Â Using trace required you to not look at your Flex app to see traces, you had to run in debug mode, and you had to use ASCII art to filter messages. Â IÂ was using LuminicBox for Flex 1.5 projects later in the game, and in 2 & 3, I used the AS3 update of it by Mark Walters. Â There were a couple of problems, though, and some features I wanted to add.
Preface
When brought into existing projects in a consulting role, there will often be the perception the project is “mostly done”, or “90% there”. Â Opening up the hood, you sigh. Â You marvel at the wonders of modern programming technology, how they’ve empowered even the shoddiest, hastily thrown together, duct taped to work and work well, fooling many into a sense of functional complacency. Â You also wonder when, not if, it’ll explode in someone’s face.