1/24 – Flex Camp Omaha

2/24-2/27 – Flex 360 Atlanta

3/12-3/13 – CFUnited Europe

5/1-5/4 – CF.Objective()

5/19-5/23 – WebManiacs

6/25-6/28 – CFUnited

Overall, i thought this conference was a great success.  Many attendees of all levels.  Great networking, Great debates, and an all around good time.

Here, you can see a sample library.xml file from itunes.  The first odd thing you might notice is that there are a total of only 5 different node names used throughout the file:  plist (the root node), key, string, integer and date.  Rather than using intelligently named nodes (ie. PlayList, Song, etc), a dict node is used to indicate any arbitrary grouping of other nodes.  Within a dict, you will find other dict nodes, or key nodes followed by either a node describing a datatype (string, integer or date).

The real challange in parsing this, is that there is no grouping of keynames to their values, except for the order in which they appear.  For example, for a song named "Every Worthy Cause" performed by Ben Wakeman, rather than an xml structure like this:

<song name="Every Worthy Cause" artist="Ben Wakeman" />  

or

<song><name>Every Worthy Cause</name><artist>Ben Wakeman</artist></song>

ITunes has it structured like this:

<dict><key>Name</key><string>Every Worthy Cause</string><key>Artist</key><string>Ben Wakeman</string></dict>

 This poses a number of challenges, primarily, because the only thing which associates the Name node with the value Every worthy cause is the order the nodes appear.  This makes the use of E4X for parsing the nodes nearly impossible.   Here, you can see the solution I came up with for parsing this xml.

package parsers{
 import mx.collections.ArrayCollection;
 import valueObjects.PlayListEntry;
 import flash.utils.Dictionary;
 import utils.TimeFormatter;
 
 
 public class LibraryParser{
  private static var lib:XML;
  public static function parseLibrary(xml:XML):ArrayCollection{
   var ac:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection();
   lib = xml;
   for each(var d:XML in xml.dict.dict.dict){
    ac.addItem(parseSong(d));
   }
   return ac;
  }
  private static function parseSong(song:XML):PlayListEntry{
   var ple:PlayListEntry = new PlayListEntry();
   var tune:Dictionary= new Dictionary();
            
   var key:String;
   for each (var tuneProperty:XML in song.children()){
             
       if (tuneProperty.name() == "key"){
           key = tuneProperty.text();
       } else {
           tune[key] = String(tuneProperty.text());
       }
   }
   ple.album = tune.Album;
   ple.artist = tune.Artist;
   ple.bitRate = tune["Bit Rate"];
   ple.genre=tune.Genre;
   ple.location=tune.Location;
   ple.name = tune.Name;
   ple.sampleRate = tune["Sample Rate"];
   ple.songLength = tune["Total Time"];
   ple.year=tune.Year;
   ple.lengthString = TimeFormatter.formatTime(ple.songLength);
   return ple;
  }
 }
}

What this does, is to find each dict node which indicates a song, and then loop over each of its children in order.  If it finds a node called Key, it creates a new entry in a Dictionary object (like a HashMap).  Once the dictionary is fully assembled, the elements from the dictionary are parsed into a strongly typed class called PlayListEntry, which simply specify all the attributes of a song.  The PlayListEntry class looks like this:

package valueObjects{
 public class PlayListEntry {
  public var name:String;
  public var artist:String;
  public var album:String;
  public var genre:String;
  public var songLength:int;
  public var year:int;
  public var location:String;
  public var bitRate:int;
  public var sampleRate:int;
  public var lengthString:String;
 }
}

A version of these files for use with Apollo (in which you pass in a FileStream object, rather than xml), can be found here.

If anyone has a more elegant solution to parsing this library.xml file into something usable in AS3, I'd love to hear it.

Summer 2007 – Daily builds of the Flex 3 SDK will be provided.  Online access to the bug base will be publicly available.

Fall 2007 – Flex 3 launches.

December 2007 – After the release of Flex 3,  adobe will be posting all software assets into a public Subversion repository for public access. 

More information on this can be found in the FAQ, the press release, and the discussion group

Many have asked the questions: "Why would Adobe do this?" and "how is Adobe is going to keep making money from Flex?"  While I dont have any inside information about either of these, i do have come conclusions I've drawn on these two…

Why would Adobe do this

The easy, marketing friendly answer to this question is "to grow the platform."  Of course, Adobe wants more and more people using the Flex Platform, as it enables them to sell more copies of Flex Builder, Flex Charting, Flex Data Services, etc.  Of course, I suspect this may be a bit of a defensive move as well, as it comes on the heels of Microsoft annoucing SilverLight.    As Ted Patric notes, Adobe is taking the gloves off in its battle against SilverLight.  I think its safe to assume that by open sourcing flex, more developers will adopt it, and it will set a much higher bar for MS.

How is Adobe is going to keep making money from an Open Source Flex 3?

The reality as far as product sales goes, is this is no different than flex 2.  In flex 2, there was already a free SDK, which included everything a developer would need  to build flex  apps.  This open source project will provide the same free SDK, just under a different license.  As I mentioned before, if Open Sourcing the project attracts new developers, then, additional sales of the commercial flex products (Builder, Charting , Data Services, etc) will likely follow.

If your interested in learning more, you can find the bits and more information on Adobe Labs.