Why is the design view of Flash Builder being removed?

2
votes

I asked this question:

Can Flash Builder with Flex mobile drag and drop controls for mobile apps in the design view?

One of the responses comments said the design view was going away.

Why would Adobe remove this? How can you design without it? I know you can position things in the source code but it seems like it'd be much quick to at least build the layout graphically. Why not have something like this:

http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html#interface-builder

I was interested in the Adobe products for flex mobile but it would take me much longer to position and set things right without the drag and drop of controls. I'd like to concentrate on the business part of the project.

Thanks.

3
flash-builder
I would have a hard time believing Adobe would discontinue design-view. I'm not sure Adobe has a web/application product without a design view. That's sort of their mantra -- "Design/Develop without touching the code." - swatkins
@swatkins Well, that's what I thought, but I all Adobe's demos show the code not the design view...like their scared to show it off or something. - johnny
I think they're making a move to appeal more to the developer community. Some of their criticism in the past has been that they cater to "noobies" by making it difficult to really work in the generated code. I'd be hard pressed to think they'll make a code only IDE - there are just too many great free ones available. Part of their advantage is the ability to generate code. Code monkeys just don't like the inefficiency of that generated code. - swatkins
@swatkins Its hardly developing if your not touching the code. Adobe is clearly not very focused on the design view. A lot of the bugs in the 4.6 design view were present way back in 3. - respectTheCode
@respectTheCode - I agree, Adobe is focused on creating a more developer-centric product. That's where they've lacked thus far, being a more design-centric product suite. They know this, so they're making a push to be more code-view friendly. But to suggest that they're going to drop design view is naive in my opinion. There are just too many non-developers that use their products. I think it's a safer bet that they're trying to cater to both the design and developer communities more than they have in the past. - swatkins

3 Answers

2
votes

I'm guessing with all the different screen sizes and rotations the builder just became impractical. With designers the best way to handle different screen sizes is often to create a new screen for each size. Now we are up to hundreds of size/rotation combinations it could be that the designer view just isn't the right way to go.

In java every group I've worked with (or discussed the issue with) that has used a swing GUI builder has eventually reverted to layouts in code to deal with 2-way problems, screen resizing issues and forward/backward/lateral compatibility (tool updates or moving across to different visual designer tools).

On top of that, the design view of 3.6 continually destabilized our eclipse sessions--you could work in design view for 3 files over an hour or so before eclipse would crash. It's possible they couldn't overcome the bugs or decided it was too much trobule.

1
votes

Probably due to the new focus which seems to be on "gaming", i.e. perhaps abandoning one of the core developer groups (intranet/business). It also was (as Adobe says) not the most stable part of the IDE, so it would probably have required a rewrite & much testing to assure it works with Apache Flex 4.8.

Also, perhaps the myth that "nobody uses design view" (apparently there are a lot of "nobodies") finally took hold. The myth should have been: "nobody who isn't designing a complex form or application uses design view". (Excuse the double negative..)

A number of vocal people want to promote their own feature requests over those of other people, so they downplay the need or usefulness of the features they don't use or need. Yeah, it's easy to go without design view if you're only developing components, or if you're designing mobile apps to fit on a 2 inch screen... too bad Flex is about 1000% more ideally deployed in an Intranet PC environment.

No design view means I'm probably not a Flex developer moving forward, unless some alternative appears. JavaFX is looking nice, nowadays.

1
votes

Flex Builder Alternative

There's a new Visual Studio based desginer for Flex apps for all the flex designers out there. Its called Amethyst and its supports visual designing of Flex forms and debugging and stuff. If you don't have VS you can grab a free version (google "visual studio express").

I've checked out the trial with Visual Studio 2012, and my review is as follows:

If you come from a Flash Builder background:

  • The visual designer works okay
  • The overall code experience is okay, editing works, and it has a nice class/member navigation bar on the top if that counts
  • Refactoring is available but buggy (renaming a function sometimes renames a class)
  • It has project types for AIR, Flash Player, Android
  • It has an updater which lets you download new flex/android SDKs

If you come from a FlashDevelop background:

  • The overall code editing experience is horrible, and way inferior to FlashDevelop.
  • Refactoring is fast, but buggy -- renaming a function sometimes renames a class, but much faster than FD, where it could take 10 minutes to rename a static function
  • Debugging is okay (it works and quite fast)
  • Compilation is just as slow as FD
  • IntelliSense is slow -- you have to wait like 1-2 secs to have it list locals
  • IntelliSense is dumb and irritating -- FD show the menu directly as you type, here you have to press Ctrl+Spacebar or type "this." to open the menu

So my conclusion is : if you come from a Flash Builder background and you need the visual designer then by all means use this. If you come from FlashDevelop background, steer clear of this horrid code editor!