Please think about AIR

[Luke Bayes]

Hey Folks,

Just wanted to touch base with everyone on the big Adobe announcements
and what it may mean for Sprouts.

I was able to drop in a new Flex 3 SDK tool this morning, which you
can learn more about here:
http://www.asserttrue.com/articles/2008/02/25/flex-3-sdk-released-in-sprouts

This led me into considering the AIR tool integration which risks
falling down a very long and slippery slope.

AIR applications can be built using two different technologies.

a) ActionScript 3 and/or MXML
b) HTML and JavaScript

It should be very trivial for me to bring Sprout support for AS3 /
MXML in AIR, and I expect to have this by next weekend.

But what does it mean to build a Sprout project for an HTML /
JavaScript AIR application?

We have already had some requests for HTML / SWFObject integration
with Sprouts and I've managed to punt on these for the time being, but
I'm starting to feel like we need to think about it.

Here are some starting points:

a) Sprouts is a platform. It can support whatever technologies we
choose to support. We can spin out bundles with generators, tools,
libraries and tasks for JavaScript / HTML development just as easily
as for AS / MXML.

b) Would you expect to be able to develop an HTML / JavaScript AIR
application from Sprouts?

c) If we're supporting HTML development, would that interest anyone?

d) What areas, in your opinion should we avoid in terms of JavaScript / HTML?

Seems kind of big to me (understated), is anyone interested in helping
with this work?

Thanks,

Luke Bayes

[Alexander Bienz]

Hmm,

Although it's great to have choice and flexibility, I believe it may be over-engineering to use Sprouts for HTML and JavaScript projects.

[Jon Messer]

I'm just starting to use sprouts, but I agree it's not the kind of tool I'd use to do html/javascript even for AIR.

Although if you have the platform for delivery (sprouts) and someone wants to bundle up a js/html package it wouldn't hurt anything.

[Luke Bayes]

These are good comments, and I'm glad to hear it!

What I'm hearing, is that we need to get the SWF AIR implementation
and we can 'enable' HTML AIR apps, but don't really need to build out
an AIR HTML project / bundle?

Anyone else agree or disagree?

Thanks,

Luke Bayes
http://www.projectsprouts.org

[Todd Cullen]

 I tend to agree with what's already been said. I'd love to see sprout's support other runtimes/platforms beyond Flash but for now I believe the project should stay focused on its core competencies. Once we've got a polished 1.0 release and a larger crowd of committers, it might make sense to revist this question. Seems a little too early to diversify right now.

Cheers,
Todd

[Simeon Bateman]

Hey Luke,

The steps for building AIR applications from html and js are actually much simpler than doing so with flex.  Mainly because no compilation has to occur.

The real value I see in sprouts integration is 2 fold.  The first is just having a site template that auto generates the application descriptor file and sets up your main html page.  The second is in having automated rake tasks for building and packaging the tools.  The AIR sdk provides the ADL (debug launcher) and ADT (developer tools for signing and packaging) and to have those wrapped up in rake tasks would be great.

I spent a lot of time pushing Flex into the open source communities and they always get excited when I talk about sprouts.  So being able to demo similiar functionality for AIR would be awsome!

Thats my view on it all anyway :)

Take care,

simeon

[Luke Bayes]

Sounds good Simeon!

Depending on how challenging it winds up being integrating with the
adl, I expect to have something demonstrable by next weekend.

Thanks,

Luke

[Cam]

May be an idea to talk to the person behind airake and see if it'd
make sense/be possible to integrate the two projects?

http://airake.rubyforge.org/

[Luke Bayes]

Wow!

Thanks for the link, I'll check in with them for sure.

lb.