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What’s more than just a Flex Calendar?

Andrew Spaulding — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 05:16:38 +0000

The Flex Scheduling Framework of course! A Flex calendaring component is still one of the highest search terms that pops up for Flex Daddy on Google (flex + calendar). The Adobe Consulting team released this open source framework on Adobe Labs a few months back, but given how highly sought after this kind of thing is I thought it was worth another mention.

Check it out at http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_Scheduling_Framework

Ely also has a great calendaring example over on his blog too!

Flex Calendar – can it be that hard?

Andrew Spaulding — Wed, 04 May 2005 06:02:25 +0000

Well a requirement has come up where we would like to have some sort of flex calendar component. In its simplest form it would be nice to show on the date chooser which days currently have at least one task. Sounds simple enough doesn’t it?

Maybe not so simple. As discussed with Jesse Warden on flexcoders, this could be quite overwhelming, with no simple solution. The current implementation of the DateChooser component doesnt really offer much leeway in terms of extension. As Jesse put it – “the not made to be extended datechooser”

But here goes nothing. After taking a look at the code I noticed that the Date Chooser is drawn by mx.controls.CalendarLayout. Isn’t this a lovely class, all 2000 lines of it hehe. Ah well, I found the methods I need to modify (one of them being about 400 lines of code alone) so I might as well take a stab at it.

Over the coming weeks I’ll see what I can muster up, and try and keep an update of my progess here for all to see. Kind of a step by step ‘make your own calendar’.

Stay tuned…

UPDATE
Well that kinda didn’t go as planned. I’ve completely dropped customising the DateChooser as it was going to take up time I just couldnt spare. But in the meantime, be sure to check out Keven Hoyt’s post – Custom Calendaring With Flex.

SynergyFLEX follow up

Andrew Spaulding — Mon, 02 May 2005 05:26:57 +0000

Well following up on my little plug for Scott Barnes (mossyblog.com) and his new framework, I thought I better post some sort of review on the presentation.

The framework is based closely on Mach-II. It assists in structuring your code in such a way that it improves maintainability, separation of view logic from presentation and further allows for decoupling of components. The framework uses a single config XML based file that contains your screens, events, listeners, properties and so forth, in a manor familiar to Cold Fusion developers who use mach-ii.

*Rather than get into the nitty gritty of Mach-II, take a look at the following links:

Mach-II home page
Mach-II @ corfield.org

To quote Scott, he told me that although Cairngorm (the MVC architecture from iteration::two) was a great discipline in dividing logic from presentation, the developers he works with are familiar with Mach-II, so it just seemed right to help flatten their Flex learning curve. If they could focus on their problem domain rather than learning to architect a Flex application he could see the framework proving its benefits.

By no means is this the right solution, and by no means is this the only solution. SynergyFLEX, being yet another framework, aims to assist team based development, reduce maintenance time/costs, help make building applications from the ground up alot easier, and make it simpler to add new functionality or improve on existing code/components.

Over the coming weeks (or maybe longer) there should hopefully be a public download available, or possibly even a sourceforge project. But don’t get your hopes up just yet because the framework is still in beta. If you are interested in finding out more about SynergyFLEX please drop us a line.

A recording of the presentation can be viewed at the following url:
http://macromedia.breezecentral.com/p39821495

SynergyFLEX Breeze Presentation

Andrew Spaulding — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 03:50:03 +0000

Scott Barnes of mossyblog.com will be running a Breeze presentation on his Macromedia Flex framework SynergyFLEX as part of Macromedia Australia/New Zealand Community Seminars.

SynergyFLEX is an application development framework based on the Mach-II Coldfusion Framework. Scott has written a number of posts on his framework and Mach-II, just follow these links:

MachII for Flex
Mach-II 2.0 (What I would change)
Synergy 0.9a – Flex Framework Preview
SynergyFLEX 0.12a

These posts should give you a great overview of the framework and how it fits with the Mach-II architecture.

Presentation details:

Date: Friday, April 29th 2005
Time: 3pm (Standard Time +1000 UTC)
Link: SynergyFLEX Breeze Presentation

Click here to see what time it is in your part of the world.

Hope to see you all there