Flex Cookbook whip up some recipes
Have you every gone to the store to look at cookbooks. I always find cookbooks in Costco and Barnes n Noble to be quite interesting. Just looking over the wide variety of books confirms there are many ways to cook up the good nutritional substance we all need. I had the opportunity to preview the new cookbook area for Flex developers.
Flex developers have many places to learn and cook up ideas, scripts, solutions, etc… We have the Adobe site with its forums, Flex developer center, white papers, blog aggregator, and support area. A new addition brought to use by the team that produced Flex 2 product line is found at flex.org.
For the community we have the FlexCoders group located on Yahoo groups, cflex.net, flexauthority.com, and many other sites/community blogs.
With all the blogs, wiki, forums, mailing lists, and pages of information is there another way to share and assimilate data easier?
Craig Goodman wrote an article introducing a little about the new cookbook for flex developers here.
Now here is my take on it. First off it is all about the Flex community like Craig mentions. This will make it or break depending on the community participation. The next big feature is the central role of tagging. Posts will be tagged by the authors of the post as well as the community. The ability to find information by tags gives easy access to information that you are looking for or stuff you weren’t looking for. For example, when you normal go to the forums to search for a solution you are doing keyword search. There could actually be forum posts which are related but do not have your keyword in it. Of course the same could be said for searching by tags, but with keyword and tag filtering combined in an easy to use one page approach you have something interesting. This is what the cookbook area can provide for the community. We will see combined contextual, keyword, relative tags, and content rating search filter method to provide the compelling Flex area to find code examples and solutions.
The meat of the posting mechanism will work like a blog with capability to post code, links, text, etc… I found it quite refreshing to see something different then searching through the archives of FlexCoders or reading through threads on the forums to find some bit of information. Then on top of that forgetting where that bit of information was the next time I want to find it. The cookbook area will provide tagging capabilities but also new methods for searching and discovering related solutions.
Since the community will provide the content and its relational benefit it would be nice to see features that provide mechanisms to co-exist with the current community information hubs. Be it blogs, forums, mailing lists, or groups. Then we would have the best of both worlds.
A lot of things have happened in the last week, and many more are to come. I hope the Flex community will growth at the rate they are wishing it will make for some fun times.