Reflex has a home!

[Ben Stucki]

Hi all,

I'm happy to announce that Reflex finally has a homepage! We're still working on a few key items like examples and setup guides, but we've decided to push it out today in the spirit of releasing early and often. When the first official Reflex release comes out we're likely to provide downloads in two flavors, something like "AS3 Only" & "Standalone" (for custom compiler extensions). I'm trying to make the site as Flash-user friendly as possible. Any thoughts on improving it to be less intimidating and more helpful are always welcome. Thanks!

http://reflex.io

- Ben

[Ben Stucki]

Hi all,

I wanted to send a quick update to let everyone know that shortly after the site release I created a permanent home for a few more items.

http://docs.reflex.io - This will be the documentation for our latest public release. It's being updated with the nightly builds until we hit our preview release. Note that we're using custom templates to integrate testing and coverage information into the docs! Check it out. http://docs.reflex.io/reflex/behaviors/SelectableBehavior.html

http://tests.reflex.io - This is a JUnit style overview of our tests. Tests are now included in the Reflex project itself under the "test" folder. If you want to run them you'll need to add it to your source path. We're still very light on tests, so if you want to contribute a few just fork us on github and send a pull request. The docs and test reports will be updated automatically as part of the build. How awesome is that?

http://support.reflex.io - This is the official place for support questions. Eventually we'll start pushing user specific issues here and will try to keep this list open for general architecture discussions.

Thanks,

- Ben

[Tyler Wright]

So cool to see the Tests Passed in the docs ...

nice work Ben!

[Baz]

That's really great, and  much needed, very nice work!

[David Knape]

Site looks great, and the docs with test results are beautiful.

-dk

--
David Knape
Programmer / Consultant

[viatropos]

Very cool! Out of curiosity, how are you hosting/building the site?

Just to throw it out there, you can fully host static websites
directly from Github with Github Pages. It makes the whole open
source project feel that much more open source, friendly, and
accessible. Here's a quick list of popular sites hosted directly from
Github:

- Sinatra Ruby Framework: http://sinatra.github.com/
- Thoughtbot (leading Rails company): http://thoughtbot.github.com/
- Robotlegs: http://robotlegs.github.com/

It's free, and we could all look at the code for the website when we
were interested :). I know I love that, helps me learn what it takes
to make open source work. You can also host swfs and javascript files
and all that no problem, for the examples section. Or if it was
really necessary, a free public GAE CDN. So instead of us having to
go to 17 pages to download all the examples, we could just fork the
github "reflex-examples" repository which hooks directly into the
site...

Also, I think an essential part of today's project websites is to have
a super easy way to contribute examples and guides. But hardly anyone
has this set up. There are two shining examples though, Rails guides
and Spree Guides:

- http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
- http://spreecommerce.com/documentation/

Those pages or website sections are dynamically generated from Textile
documents hosted on github.

- http://github.com/lifo/docrails
- http://github.com/railsdog/spree-guides

While I was learning the frameworks, I was able to fork the guides and
write very detailed/specific tutorials on those few tiny things I was
having difficulty with, something that a centralized team would never
have the time to do. Then the maintainers just make sure it compiles
and push it to the website. I think having something like that for
Reflex would be awesome!

Best,
Lance

[cambiata]

Great!


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[Ben Stucki]

Hey Lance,

That's pretty cool. I didn't realize the robotlegs site was setup like that. We're using a wordpress install to host the site at the moment, so it'd be difficult to open source the whole thing right now. We're definitely up for making as much of it open as we can though. For example the custom doc templates I'm using are already up on github at http://github.com/benstucki/reflex-asdoc. I'm trying to keep it pretty well parametrized so that other projects can use the templates. Any examples we use will also be available on github, but I'm still exploring the best setup for this. I would like to have some examples recompiled as part of the build process and also need to consider including these examples as part of the docs. There will probably be other "showcase" examples that would be maintained by 3rd party individuals though and might not be part of our build system. In either case, I'm sure making source available will be a requirement.

Also, I do want to be sure there's some way to contribute guides. We considered setting up a wiki for this purpose, but hosting markdown files somewhere also seems pretty cool. I'm not sure what the best option is yet. If someone's interested in taking these theme assets and setting up a static page, we could probably be convinced to move to a static site. Any other suggestions are also welcome. We'll have to see what our needs are as we move along I guess.

- Ben

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[cambiata]

Good to see a link to your interim git-examples!
(It has been two looong weeks :-)

Jonas