6 March 2008

Flex Blog Engine

I am currently developing a blog engine based in Flex. It is to be an entirely Flash/Flex based application.

Goals

There are five main goals (read: features) to this project (in order of priority):

  • Ease of Use: I have become increasing frustrated with HTML-based blog engines as they inevitably get far too complex for everyday use.
  • SEO-friendly Architecture: Blogs thrive on SEO and this engine should be no exception.
  • Lightweight: I want this blog engine to be as lightweight as possible. This includes both on the server-side and client-side.
  • Fast: Not that I’m going to make it intentionally slow, but speed optimization is a big issue. I don’t want the experience to be similar to traditional Flash sites where you have to wait for
  • Extensibility: The engine will be extensible through lightweight plugins. There will be no piling on of monolithic plugin files. This will likely develop into a full-fledged SDK, but that is far down the road

Features

An overview of features I have planned for Version 1:

  • User system
  • Add/Edit/Delete posts
  • Keywords and tags
  • Integrated administration
  • Comments
  • Possibly develop a rudimentary plugin system with one or two demonstration plugins.

Yes, it’s a pretty simple system. My reasoning behind that is I don’t want to get bogged down trying to implement a plethora of blog features. A simple, yet robust application is the best to start from. I will be able to avoid code clutter, feature creep, and focus on what really matters: making blog entries. I want to avoid the code bloat I see in many applications. Usually this code bloat end up taxing servers and making the application less responsive, which fights against my fourth feature.

Technology

So, what technology am I planning on using?

  • Flex/Flash
  • PureMVC
  • MySQL
  • PHP
  • WebOrb for PHP

While my decision to use WebOrb is somewhat contrary to my goal of lightweight (WebOrb for PHP is, as of version 2.0.2, approximately a 7MB install), it was chosen due to its ease of use and the fact that I believe it to be the best AMF3 gateway out there, short of coding my own specifically for this use (see: insanity). However, I believe that at this point the advantages of using WebOrb outweigh the disadvantages.

When? When?! When?!!!

Ok, maybe you’re not that enthusiastic, but someone’s bound to ask. The answer is, when its ready. I plan to work on this as much as possible since I’m very excited to, but in the meantime, it’s better to tease with screenshots and videos than to raise hopes as to a potential release. That said, don’t hesitate to contact me, while I may not be willing to share the darkest secrets of my application, I’d never turn down a discussion about Flex.

Posted in Uncategorized |