Project Status: Flight and Reflex

As a primary contributer on a couple of open source (read part-time) projects my time is sometimes stretched thin. The Flight Framework is a core library focused on providing many common solutions such as improved databinding, undo & redo, an MVC workflow among others. Flight released its “1.0 Release Client” 8 months ago and has yet to finalize a 1.0 release. The framework still rocks but it’s not well tested and documented, and it isn’t getting there in a hurry – a common problem with open source software.

The biggest delay to Flight has been Reflex, my old flame and new obsession. Reflex is a UI component framework, fast and small enough for Flash projects, but with a planned feature set that’s richer than Flex. Reflex will be introduced to the community at the upcoming 360|Flex conference, after which I anticipate being able to split my time between these two open source projects once again.

Completed and combined, Flight and Reflex together should be able to replace the entire Flex Framework in features and solutions. This reality in large part will depend on the response from the community. The effort will require many more contributors and time to reach a sufficient level of stability and completeness. The reasons why we would want to replace the Flex Framework are another topic for another post.

For now it’s bit by bit with this month’s focus on Reflex. For those wishing to use Flight Framework it is open and available, but may be better suited for developers who aren’t afraid to dig a little. There are other good application frameworks and undo solutions out there, but no one is building a comprehensive component framework outside of Adobe. This is why Reflex must prevail! More on Reflex soon – until then, the steering committee is the only available resource.