Calling all flex/flash/as developers: We need to come up with a unified bundle design for these technologies.
I couldn't agree more! Sorry for my (eerily similar) post over on textmate-dev [1]. I didn't know this conversation was happening over here.
[1]: http://tinyurl.com/yrdwmd
AS3 bundle: Should contain ActionScript 3 language syntax, snippets, etc. that are relevant only to AS3 as a language. (just as the ruby bundle only contains ruby stuff and not rails stuff).
Completely agree. Though don't forget support for E4X. Its syntax is so interwoven with AS3's that I think it'd be hard to implement that as a separate bundle.
Flex2 bundle: Should contain any extensions to the AS3 bundle that are relevant to flex. Should contain MXML language syntax, snipptets, etc. Should contain MXML and AS3 templates for new applications and components. Should contain commands to build components and applications using the flex2 framework standalone lib. ("FlexMate")
This would also seem the proper place to extend CSS bundle to deal with Flex-only styles. And I'd make a point of ensuring that whatever features/grammars are added, they're added on top of text.xml. MXML is so strongly XML based, it'd be a shame if we threw out all of XML bundle's useful stuff.
Also, I'm a little weary of calling this bundle "Flex2" as what we are really editing is MXML files. We don't call HTML bundle "Web Page bundle", after all. But that's a completely semantic argument, and I am willing to surrender.
Allen writes:
And now Simon Gregory committed an AS3 + Flex2 bundle.
I would vote strongly against wrapping these things into a single bundle. For one thing, AS3 is going to be very popular as the basis for Javascript2/ECMAScript4 and will likely be used extensively in future non-Flex projects by Adobe. It will need to evolve on its own without being coupled to Flex. And who knows what the future holds for MXML with Apollo on the horizon. It's better, IMHO, to keep things focused and flexible. Simon: How feasible is it to break this bundle into two parts? Will that put us ahead or behind of where we are with the current stand-alone bundles?
It sounds like most of us on on the same page, here. I think it'd be nice if we could agree on a single AS3 and a single Flex bundle to focus our efforts on so we have something to congregate around. Nominations?
Cheers, -Joshua Emmons