degrafa

We’d like to welcome Pavan Podila to the Degrafa team. Pavan has a strong background in WPF/XAML and has worked on complex UI designs and custom controls. He also developed the Illustrator to XAML exporter. Pavan feels Flex is very similar in principle to WPF, so he decided to get involved with Degrafa.

Pavan’s initial role with Degrafa will be direct parsing of SVGs (like those you might get out of Illustrator) into MXML Degrafa mark-up. Beyond that he’s looking to create a feature which will able to convert that MXML to XAML. Pavan is already moving at a rapid pace and we know his involvement will only add to the flexibility of Degrafa.

To learn more about Pavan’s work you can visit his WPF blog or his Flex blog.

As we got deeper into developing Degrafa, it became more apparent that all the features we want to include are more than just a couple of developers can handle. Ben Stucki expressed interest in adding to the Degrafa efforts in ways that can only be good. We’re glad to have Ben contributing, as it means we’ll be able to do more in a shorter time frame, like get the beta out.

A while back we mentioned CSS features for Degrafa, this is where Ben’s focus will initially lie. We know he’ll be able to take the CSS integration with Degrafa much further than we were anticipating on initially and add more to it. You can read more about some of Ben’s other projects on his blog.

Here is a Flex dashboard prototype demo that was put together for EffectiveUI as a proof-of-concept. It provides a good perspective on how Degrafa could be utilized in a real-world scenario. The map, map legend and linear gauge skins were all done using Degrafa markup.

The map started as an SVG file, which was then brought into Degrafa. Each state was built up as an MXML component by extending Degrafa’s GeometryGroup. The color of each state are applied at runtime depending on a product selection and the value for the selected state.

As Degrafa get’s closer to a beta release, we hope to continue to provide additional examples of more advanced applications of the framework.

View the Example