Letting friends into my Kimono
March 5th, 2007
The past month has been reader feedback month at quietlyscheming. I didn’t intend it to be that way, but I’ve been receiving a steadily growing stream of emails from people who have been using, abusing, and improving the samples I’ve been posting here.
Which is great news. Flex development has been exploding of late, and the number of people showing interest in not only learning about but actually creating richer interfaces in their own applications seems to be hitting an inflection point (aside: originally I accidentally spelled that ‘inflexion.’ I think I need a vacation).
But I need some help, and maybe you can provide it. Maintaining this blog, and the samples on it, is really only my night job (to the surprise, and dismay, of my wife and son). My day to day responsibilities as architect on the Flex SDK don’t really afford a lot of time to maintain, fix, and enhance the code I post here. Fortunately, a bunch of really smart developers from the flex community are doing that for me. A whole bunch of those emails I’ve been getting this past month are accopanied by bug fixes and enhancements.
BUT…even keeping up with those emails is proving to be a lot of work. So I’m looking to change how I structure my code here. Specifically, I’d like to make it easier for other people to contribute fixes back into the code for the more popular components like the Calendar, DisplayShelf, Fisheye, etc.
But I’ve never worked on an community project that’s open to outside developers, and have no idea what the best way to do that is. Specifically, I’d like to:
* open up a source control repository for anyone to pull from (I’ve got a public svn repository right now, but I don’t want to spend time managing users, etc).
* accept patches in email from other developers that I can quickly and easily review (i.e., with a visual diff tool) to accept or reject.
* selectively start to open up the source control for other developers to contribute directly without my review.
I’m betting someone reading this has done this before, or worked on a project like this before. Anyone got any ideas?
March 5th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
FlexLib! FlexLib! FlexLib!
http://flexlib.net
Seriously, I’ll come find you at your session tomorrow at 360Flex. We’ll get you set up as a project member and get your code in.
March 5th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
How about hosting it on http://code.google.com/p/flexlib ? SVN and WIKI are already configured and it would be a perfect place for your fantastic components.
March 6th, 2007 at 9:21 am
I’d vote for flexlib as well. I visit Doug’s blog, flexlib, and yours almost everyday. I’ve used both of your components and code in active projects. I’m just beginning this programming journey and help from people like yourselves has had a great impact on my development. Be great to see you two get together.
March 7th, 2007 at 5:52 am
Why not put your project on http://sourceforge.net like everyone else? :-) You get source control, discussion groups , bug tracking etc etc for free. Plus registration in the largest collaborative software development community in the world.
March 7th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Speaking of, I have a small bug fix for your tile component that I should get over to you, but I can’t comment on that page. It’ll be good when you find a place for your source code.
June 3rd, 2007 at 6:54 pm
[...] Which is great news. Flex development has been exploding of late, […] Source: [Link] [...]
July 19th, 2007 at 1:08 am
Hi Ely,
In Animated DragTile Component 0.1- TeamMgr, how it can arragned if the container items are in different width and height assume player component size is depends on the dragged item
September 9th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Have you decided what you would like to do. If so I am interested to help maintain the calendar component. I worked with it, I know some of it and fixed stuff before. I am guessing there might be others hook us up in an email conversation and I would like to help.
October 25th, 2007 at 11:56 am
hey, could you have white backgrounds and black fonts instead? I love your stuff, but it’s a little hard to read for me. I still read it anyways cuz they are interesting.