So there’s quite a few new things I’ve been now actively exploring and few oldies that are turning out to be goodies.
First off Away3D(http://away3d.com/). Now I have some previous experience with Papervision3D and I love it, don’t get me wrong I’m not saying Away3D is better, but in certain cases its been outperfoming PV3D, especially when it comes to effects. Demo’s to follow.
Secondly Flare (http://flare.prefuse.org/), the API is created to visualize data, simply put. The stregths are the amount of data sets you can feed to this thing for the most part can be reinterpreted, mixed and matched, swapped completely, on the visual front end without A BILLION lines of code, all while maintaining complete data integrity and rich interactions. Just check out the demos! Also it is a PureAS3 library, so if you’re fond of the FlexSDK (like ME), you’ll love FLARE. Doesn’t mean you CAN’T use it in the FlexIDE, i just probably won’t… until maybe of course FDT comes out with their MXML editor, which is slated to ship 3.13.09, so here’s hoping!
THIRD, Merapi (http://www.merapiproject.net/) Project I found out about over at Roundarch from Dave Meeker (http://www.whatanexperience.org/). AIR meets Java bridge. So Flash application (built for AIR) can have full access to anything the JVM does. So lets see, connecting to external devices, connection to lets say I don’t know the GPU, controlling spy satellites, processing a ridiculous amount of numbers, PROCESSING. Lets just say the permutations of this can be SWEEET. Not only that, it might give J2EE developers are reason to jump to Flash outside of just Flex.
Four, Python(http://www.python.org). First programming language I’ve come across that doesn’t really have ANY standards, just conventions that you SHOULD probably follow… but you don’t really need to if you don’t want to. It the nihilistic equivalent of C/Perl/VB/PHP.
Recently working on a project at Roundarch i came across a Google library written in Python, so because “this is how I roll”, instead of trying to circumvent the problem, I just dove right in instead. The Python.org site has quite a few resources to get you up and running.
Vista machine, setup took maybe about 20 minutes, and I went for PyDev as my IDE, since its a plug-in that goes right into Eclipse, and the price was right: FREE. Within about 5 minutes of setting up my machine to run Python, I was launching my first app in Python.
Graphically it’s nothing fancy, actually graphically its not really anything, all of it is code or command-line, so if you don’t like code, RUN! Anyways Python has alot of nice features for dragging power out of the OS, and it’s FAST. It’s also pretty easy to learn, probably what impressed me the most is the ability to write a for{} statement that used multiple variables, did multiple comparisons with their own individual conditionals, tied to other conditionals and including an escape case all in one line of code looks something like this:
print "\n".join(["%s=%s" % (k, v) for k, v in info.items()])
or try this one in AS3 and see how many lines not to mention variable declarations which Python magically pulls out of thing air when u first use a varibale, now I’m not bashing AS3 ( i <3 AS3), but similar conventions would be beneficial in some cases, although I can here 3/4′s of the OOP AS3′ers cringe. ( AND NO, i don’t want AS2 back!)
"""Takes module, class, list, dictionary, or string."""
methodList = [method for method in dir(object) if callable(getattr(object, method))]
processFunc = collapse and (lambda s: " ".join(s.split())) or (lambda s: s)
print "\n".join(["%s %s" %(method.ljust(spacing),processFunc(str(getattr(object, method).__doc__)))for method in methodList])
Check out that last line ; ) I didn’t write that though I’m not anywhere to that good yet, but you can get the whole book i got it from here: http://diveintopython.org/
Alright that’s ALL. For now.
