Form and Function

Over the past couple of months I have become more deeply involved in the open source Degrafa project that was started by Juan Sanchez and Jason Hawryluk over 1 year ago.   Today the Degrafa team has grown quite substantially and I represent the 8th official team member.

There were three primary motivations for me joining the Degrafa team.

Reason 1.  Degrafa just plain ROCKS!  

What I love most about Degrafa is that it represents an extremely expressive, yet compact markup syntax to produce amazing graphical assets.  Basically it allows me to do some really cool things with very little code.

Degrafa leverages the low level flash drawing API's to implement sophisticated vector and raster rendering via MXML markup.   What does this mean to your average Flex developer?  It means that you no longer have to resort to working in Flash or other vector based tools to create complex vector assets, and you no longer have to struggle with using procedural API's to manually draw your graphics.   Degrafa piggy-backs off of the same metaphors that most XML based markup syntax does, in that the nested XML structures you use to define your page layout create a visual corollary to the actual physical layout of the code.   With XML markup you can easily see the primary relationships between objects due to their nesting structures.  

When you combine XML Markup with Flash/Flex's powerful binding mechanism you get a very expressive, compact, and intuitive way to code graphical assets.     One example of this effect in action can be seen in some of the GeometryRepeater code I have been working on for Degrafa (to be covered in a later blog post.)  I was able to take a couple very simple base classes and in less than 15 lines of MXML and 10 lines of AS create a completely dynamic single series Column/Area/Point/Line chart.   That is 25 lines of total code, that is what I call powerful!

When I started working with Flex in late 2005, I had never been directly exposed to the open source community and always regarded the open source movement with a detached fascination and certain level of disbelief that so many developers would volunteer their time for an apparently non-commercial effort.  Over the past couple of years, my eyes have been opened to the many advantages to open source on commercial, personal, and social level.   In learning Flex and watching the growth of the community I have repeatedly reaped the benefits of others efforts in many areas ranging from free (and excellent) components, blogs, and sharing of ideas.  

I think an individual can only "take" for so long before starting to feel an indebtedness and desire to give back to the community.  Probably most of all is the great level of personal satisfaction I receive when I contribute something to the community that others find great value in.   I probably receive more satisfaction from releasing a component I spent time working on and seeing many people positively respond to it in my blog than I do from landing a large consulting contract.

Both Jason and Juan (the two founders of degrafa) are so genuinely enthusiastic about the project and immanently accessible.  When I dove into Degrafa for the first time a couple of months back for work on my Gauge component I started trading e-mails with Juan, which quickly led to multiple chat sessions per day.  Juan was always available to answer questions and point me in the right direction, and then he connected me with Jason, who was equally accessible and helpful.   Once I started working with Jason and he showed me the guts of Degrafa I realized "wow, these are some truly bright people, creating a really amazing framework."  I was hooked.

Moving forward my role at Degrafa will probably have many facets, but I will most likely be focusing as a direct contributor to the core engine as well as helping to provide  some organizational support for Degrafa as an entity and open source project.