Which version of Flash Builder do I need? - apache-flex

There is this similar question but I think it was answered when Flash Builder was still Flex Builder.
I need to buy Flash Builder and really the Adobe site is not clear about the different versions. I need to know what is the difference between the standard and the premium editions. Is there a lack of components in the standard? Is there anything that I won´t be able to compile in standard or the differences are just in terms of the IDE functionality?
Thank you

The main differences between Standard and Premium versions are:
Premium version has possibility to create and run unit tests within IDE.
Premium version has profiler.
Premium version has Network Monitor (to see requests and responses).
Premium version has advanced Data wizards (to generate code by WSDL or to generate server side BlazeDS/LCDS code by DB).
Premium version has possibility to operate with automation libraries.
All the other standard libraries, including data visualization (charts and ADG), are free and open-sourced and available in SDK since (if I not mistaken) 3.2 SDK version.
So if you need:
Code editing.
Debugger.
Design view.
Refactoring.
Compiling (including AIR).
SDK features and libraries.
Multi SDK features.
In this case Standard version is enough.
You can see link to the compare matrix which hasn't all the features listed in # www.Flextras.com comment :)

Related

How do I build ITK-SNAP?

I use ITK 4.3, VTK and Qt on Visual Studio 9. How do I add ITK-SNAP?
I want to know the difference between ITK and ITK-SNAP and what does ITK-SNAP add compared to ITK.
I started working with ITK. Do I need to change my code or can I continue in my project?
SNAP is a software application used to segment structures in 3D medical images. It provides semi-automatic segmentation using active contour methods, as well as manual delineation and image navigation. The software was designed with the audience of clinical and basic science researchers in mind, and emphasis has been placed on having a user-friendly interface and maintaining a limited feature set to prevent feature creep. ITK-SNAP is free software, provided under the General Public License. ITK-SNAP binaries are provided free of charge for academic or commercial use.
This tutorial provides a step by step walkthrough of building ITK-SNAP 2.4.0 from source on Windows. We will be using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 for building the application. Make sure you have VS 2010 installed and VS Service Pack 1 as well. (if required) : Click Here for full tutorial
ITK is abbrevation of Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit which is open source library which provide image processing algorithms to develop your application on different platforms ex python, c++.You can follow this link: http://qtitkvtkhelp.blogspot.in/2012/11/itk-installation-for-msvc.html to build ITK and use that in your application. ITK-SNAP It is an open source software you can directly install it from here. I think this is solution for all of your questions.

flash develop plugin

I have been using flex builder plug-in. But now trial period has expired and looking for some other option which comes free. I am trying to install flash develop plugin for eclipse. In my attempt to install I am trying this page but donno what all plugins to install...http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=3rd_Party_Plugins ...Can some one please guide. The problem i am facing here is I am not sure about what is outdated and what is useful
FlashDevelop is a standalone application (windows only), as far I know there is no plugin for eclipse. If you are searching for an eclipse plugin, there's the commercial FDT, with a 30 day trial period.
A new FlashDevelop version (4.0) is about to be released and most plugins from the old version aren't compatible with the new one. So I unless there's a new list somewhere or some plugin explicitly states that it supports the new version, every plugin there is probably outdated. Anyway, many plugins from that list have been integrated in FlashDevelop. You can of course use the latests stable 3.x version if you need a particular plugin.
If you've never used FlashDevelop, you should just try the stable 3.3.4 or the latest 4.0 beta or the very latest developement build and see if you are missing some features.
You could always write your code in Notepad and use the command line compiler provided in the free SDK. It's not going to be as nice as any IDE, but it is functional.
Another option, if you are a student or unemployed, is to request a complimentary license to Flash Builder from Adobe.
Another option is to use Tofino, a Free Visual Studio Plugin for Flex Development. However, you'll need Visual Studio for that to work. [And I assume a Windows Machine].
FlashDevelop, as others have noted, is not an Eclipse Plugin as far as I knew. It is a stand alone tool.
Other IDEs for building Flex applications are:
Sapphire Steel Amethyst, which is a commercial Visual Studio
Plugin
FDT; which is an eclipse based plugin. I believe FDT5
will have a free / community option, but I do not know if it is
available yet.
IntelliJ, which many developers swear by.
And of course Flash Builder. I believe the previous three are all commercial plugins, so do not fill your "free" Criteria.

Adobe Flex vs openlaszlo

I am currently working on a RIA project in flex, but have recently come across openlaszlo. It seems a lot of large projects have chosen it over flex, such as the streaming music service Pandora. I'm interested in why. So far the biggest advantage I have seen is that it has an abstraction layer for support of flash 6,7, 8, 9 and dhtml and has been in development for a longer time (so possibly more stable).
Has anyone had much experience using both, or just openlaszlo even? is the support for dhtml and older flash versions really that big of an advantage with the popularity of flash 9 these days? Might this just be because of many developers are already comfortable with javascript/ajax? Besides language preferences, why openlaszlo and not flex?
Thanks for any tips!
Ryan
When companies like Pandora chose OpenLaszlo, Flex was still a commercial product (even the compiler). The Flex versions 1.0 and 1.5 were not very stable, and only with the 2.0 release of Flex the platform got a lot more stable. Macromedia upset a lot of developers, since Flex 2.0 was no compatible with 1.5, and all applications had to be rewritten for the new release. In that situation quite a few companies thought that OpenLaszlo is not a bad choice.
The most powerful feature of OpenLaszlo is the LZX language. The language supports classes, animation of any numeric property, constraints using a attribute="${}" syntax, mixin support, datasets with datapath (xPath syntax based) mapping. Some of the key developer of the LZX langauge had been working on Apple's Dylan language before, and a lot of the powerful concepts of Dylan have made it into the LZX language.
I've done both OpenLaszlo and Flex development. Flex has excellent tooling support by various IDE vendors. But the ActionScript 3 language can be very limiting, as in Java you spend a lot of time thinking about your class model. OpenLaszlo emphasizes instance based development (very fast for prototyping, while it's still possible to build very complex applications with 100k+ lines of LZX code). The largest OpenLaszlo applications I'm aware of are Laszlo Webtop (120K+ lines of LZX code), and IBM Websphere Commerce Edition (http://ibm.co/Kid5tc). I've heard that other companies have created equally large applications using OpenLaszlo.
Since version 4.2 OpenLaszlo integrates the Flex SDK. The OpenLaszlo compiler generates the LZX code into JavaScript 2, and then into ActionScript 3 code. If you compile an application to both DHTML and SWF10+, you can profit from the better type checking of the Flex compiler, even if your application will only be deployed for the DHTML/HTML5 runtime.
OpenLaszlo is very stable. The last major release (4.0) has been in March 2007, although the OpenLaszlo team considered the 4.2 release to be equal to a major version upgrade, since it added the ActionScript 3 and SWF9 support to the platform. 4.2 was released in December 2008, the current stable release is the 4.9 version - although many community members and Laszlo are already using OpenLaszlo 5.0 (trunk, unreleased) in production.
After Adobe's announcement to contribute the Flex SDK to the Apache Foundation (now an Apache Foundation Incubator project), Adobe announced that they had been working on a cross-compilation feature for the next generation Flex compiler called "FalconJS". Adobe said as well, that FalconJS (which will probably be contributed to Apache Flex in Q4 2012) will not be able to cross-compile existing Flex applications into JavaScript. A simple list example of FalconJS (as demoed in December 2011) generated into 5 MB of uncompressed JavaScript code, wich could be boiled down to 2.5 MB using the Google Closure compiler's advanced mode. A similar OpenLaszlo example in the DHTML runtime compiles to less than 750k of JavaScript code.
I think your term of 'a lot of large projects' is very relative. Yes, some large companies have used it, but I don't consider any of them large projects. If you look at all of them in the OpenLaszlo showcase, they seem fairly simple interfaces to me. Also note that OpenLazslo compiles Flash, not Flex and associated framework.
To me, OpenLaszlo is an alternative for creating simple RIAs in a way that the end code can be compiled into Flash or Javascript. Haxe is another alternative to this, and I think it does a better job than OpenLaszlo.
With that said, there's a problem with these "generic" write once, compile to Flash/Javascript framework; it doesn't harness any of the power/advantages of each specific platform. Flash is constantly changing and so is Javascript with the addition of html5 tags and css3. If you ever have experience in both, you'll notice that they're very different in the way they do things and on algorithm might work well with Flash, might not with Javascript.
My point being, if you are to choose a technology, go for the one that's more appropriate. If your project has a need to have both Javascript and Flash, then this might be a good choice, but remember that you'll then be losing the 'power' of each. For instance, Flex has a very good skinning architecture and a set of tools that is essential for enterprise development. Javascript can do some pretty neat stuff with selectors, css3, and some other frameworks like jQuery.
In my experience, post compilers like OpenLaszlo eliminates those strengths. Plus, if there's a new thing that comes outs (like say, hardware accelerated video/3d for javascript/flash), you have to wait for the people at OpenLazslo to update before you can use it (if they use it).
I started developing RIAs with OpenLaszlo as it offered a cross browser run-anywhere kind of framework. The user experience delivered with it was also very good.
I moved to Flex (when it was in Beta) because:
Every capability of OpenLaszlo was available in Flex.
Flex had an extra advantage as it was a supported commercial product from a leading digital media content creation company Macromedia & later acquired by Adobe.
Flash Builder (a.k.a Flex Builder) built on Eclipse provided a good development productivity improvement. (so spending one time license fee on it is not at all an issue)
Above all Flex had better server-side integration / remoting capability.
Flex had plenty of tutorials & sample codes so ramping up a new developer was very easy.
Now Flex is also community driven open source project under Apache Software Foundation
OpenLaszlo now provides an extra feature over Flex (until FalconJS cross compiler is released) that it can run both Flash & Ajax runtime environment with a single code base .
But still Flex has an added advantage of having very good development environment (with integration to other Adobe designer tools) and good server side integration capability so for enterprise applications, Flex is a clear winner.

Developing MHEG application

I have downloaded OpenMHeg simulator..how to develop an application in mheg?what eclipse version i need to use?where do i get the sdk for mheg?
I haven't tried yet. but I think it's worth trying. Someone said that the BBC's implementation of MHEG5 is open sourced
It can be downloaded from mhegplus on sourceforge
There is no MHEG-5 SDK. There is some limited documentation available online, and a few discussions of the type hierarchy.
Since MHEG-5 has no support for user defined types and the API is completely provided by the implementation (in various states of brokenness), you only need an editor and an understanding of the application model to write applications.
I wrote an introduction to MHEGPlus a while ago but didn't go into any advanced application building techniques. There are a few more examples out there if you look for them.

Any really modern, good-looking desktop apps that are developed with PyQt/PySide?

I have started using Python for web development recently, it's kinda cool;
I have seen programs that are developed in QT/C++, which is good enough in terms of esthetics;
I have just noticed the new PySide project (which brings LGPL Qt license to Python and it doesn't support Windows yet).
In view of the above, I see the possibility of using Python + PyQt/PySide to develop cross platform apps in the future :) but I have several doubts right now:
Can PyQty/PySide be used to develop really complex/modern UI? Can somebody give me some points to have a look at some nice-looking screenshots of apps that are developed in Python+QT?
What about the performance of using Python + QT for a desktop app?
Thanks in advance!
Can PyQty/PySide be used to develop really complex/modern UI?
Desktop applications come in all sorts of varieties -- some nicely laid out, some extremely customized with virtually no semblance to a standard application for that OS. The same can be done with Qt/PyQt/PySide. As Alex said, there should be no visible difference between an application written with PyQt/PySide versus one written with Qt in C++. Any program written with Qt4 (using bindings or not) will, by default, look like a standard modern application.
Of course, there are features of recent Windows releases (and likely some on Mac OS X) that aren't supported immediately and by default in Qt, but you can almost always write some custom platform specific code for those situations where said features are truly important.
Can somebody give me some points to have a look at some nice-looking screenshots of apps that are developed in Python+QT?
The best and most open source program that I know of and which is written with PyQt, is Eric -- a Python based IDE.
What about the performance of using Python + QT for a desktop app?
For most applications the performance difference between a C++ Qt application and a PyQt application are not noticible. But if you really need performance, you can write certain parts of the application in C++ and make bindings available in Python so you can integrate the two.
TortoiseHg was re-designed using Qt and PyQt for its 2.0 release.
Here is one of several posted screenshots:
There is no aesthetic difference between the look and feel of C++ based Qt, and the PyQt and PySide wrappers on top of it. I use basically no desktop GUI apps so I couldn't point you to any implemented with any of these language/toolkit combos, but if you like the former, you'll be hard put to distinguish it in any way from the latter.
A bit late but for the record, apps such as Skype, GoogleEarth or the recent versions of VLC (media player & more) used the Qt libs.

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