Intro to Thermo and Gumbo

My last session on Monday was about Thermo (Adobe Catalyst) and Gumbo (Flex 4) and was led by Ryan Stewart.

This was a great session and he went over a ton of stuff that will be in Catalyst as well as going through an end to end example of taking a Photoshop file, importing it into Catalyst, marking up the parts as components, and then importing the resulting file into Flex as a project. When you open a Photoshop file in catalyst and mark the different parts as components and insert your transistions etc. what gets saved is an fxp file. This is basically just a zipped up flex project file! This was a nice way to show the story they have developed for the use of the Adobe products and I have to admit I was blown away.

Among other things of note, we were told that the first public beta would be in the first quarter of 2009. There is a new merge tool for Flex Builder which allows you to pull changes in from Flex Catalyst which is nice if you have developers and designers working on a project at the same time.

Something that really got me excited is the new Services Explorer in Fx. It allows you to select remote objects you wish to use and automatically creates strongly typed classes for you! That means you can treat them as normal objects (type checking and all) without having to go through it all on your own anymore. I'm really excited about this since we use remote objects a great deal.

Another nice addition to Fx is the Network Monitor which allows you to watch all network traffic between your Flex application and the Server. They have also included Flex Unit Support which allows you to generate test suites and auto-generate unit tests for your code! Of course you still have to fill in some of the actual test part but the skeleton is created for you. This is going to make life for us at 3-GIS much better.

One last thing he didn't spend much time on but which I'm interested in seeing is Templates. Basically if there is a standard way you build out classes or functions you can now save these as templates (boiler plate code) and stamp them down wherever they are needed. This could be a big time saver for anyone like us that uses a standard framework that requires a lot of the same basic code being written every time you add a new feature, screen or component.

I would tell you how I've found working with these features so far but unfortunately the preview disc they gave us was for Mac only and I'm stuck with a Windows box. The release for Windows though is supposed to be coming out early next year.