degrafa

We mentioned your entries might come in handy for something (besides the Degrafa Derby) being announced soon. Well, that something is the 360|Flex API Contest and you can use your Degrafa Derby entry for the Community category of the API contest.

The prize to the winner of the 360|Flex contest gets a PlayStation 3, which means you could really clean up if you win both contests. There are also prizes for usage of the Ribbit and Ebay APIs. The official contest site for the 360|Flex API contest will be up soon.

Get more info about the 360|Flex API Contest

We are diligently working on getting things ready for the Degrafa beta release. Things like documentation, samples, getting set up on Google Code and Google Groups, etc. are all being worked out as I write this.

Of course, with New Year’s celebration and the team being distributed all over the world, the roll out of all the components (documentation, samples, etc.) will probably be distributed throughout the day of the 1st. Then more will be added as the days go by. The main thing we want to get out there is the framework itself, so people can start playing. So stay tuned…

By the way, information will be distributed across these URLs:

• code.degrafa.com : Points to the Degrafa Google Code page.
• group.degrafa.com : Points to the Degrafa Google Group.
• samples.degrafa.com : This is where links to samples in the documentation will point to.
• docs.degrafa.com : This is where the Degrafa documentation will go.

This is all subject to change, but we’ll let you know if it does.

Before we get into the similarities and differences between Degrafa and Thermo (Flex 4 framework) I thought I’d give a little perspective of how we got to where we’re at now. When Ted Patrick announced the graphics tag at 360Flex | Seattle, people started asking us how Degrafa compared.ï¾ 

Then, when Adobe demoed Thermo at MAX, showing the use of the graphics tag, we got even more questions. The thing is, we knew the graphics tag was coming before that knowledge was made public, but we decided to keep developing.ï¾ 

We kept developing, not because of what we did know, but because of what we didn’t know. Everyone on the team had different goals for Degrafa, each of which could have been developed as a separate, stand-alone framework. However, we didn’t know if the next version of the Flex framework would do all the things we wanted and we didn’t want to wait.ï¾ 

As time passed, others like Andy McIntosh, Ben Stucki and Pavan Podila got involved, which meant more features and more people to help. Some of these features will be making it into the beta we’re getting ready to release. Other features need a little more thought and development before we feel comfortable releasing them into the wild. We also want to gauge what we do next based on the feedback from this first beta.ï¾ 

So, Degrafa versus Thermo? It’s a good question, but without having access to Thermo (or the Flex 4 framework) we can only give an answer based on what was shown at MAX and in the videos available online.ï¾ 

First off, Thermo is an application and Degrafa is not. Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework similar to the framework Thermo interfaces with (the graphics tag). We keep hearing from Adobe that with Thermo “you can draw basic shapes“, but we want to do more than that.ﾠ

Degrafa was started to be very versatile and robust so it could be used to create skins, UI graphics, data visualization and more without having to use Illustrator, Flash, etc or Drawing API knowledge. We also wanted to be able to do a lot more with CSS (post on that soon).

There is some overlap, but without having Thermo in our hands we can’t really say how much, or how little, overlap there is. One difference that we can mention is that Degrafa will be out sooner :)ï¾ 

Also, the changes coming in the Flex 4 framework, like being able to radically control the visuals in components, will only help Degrafa become more powerful. Degrafa will always be an extension of the Flex framework and not compete with it. Hopefully others will like it as much as we do.

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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.