Adobe Thermo - Get Data From Class
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007So I saw the Adobe Thermo stuff at Adobe MAX 2007 and it looked really cool. Basically, it lets designers turn a PSD, or some other asset, into a working RIA. It looks very easy, you just take a PSD and import it into Thermo, then start turning parts of your comp into common RIA components like lists, input fields, etc. It’s great because it will take that text field you drew in Photoshop that has a certain font, with a white border, and a semi transparent background, into a Flex textfield that looks exactly the same as the field you drew!
One of the cool things that you can do is to prepopulate a component, like a list, for example, with dummy data. Well, while we were in the Flex Chat, João Fernandes suggested that it would be great if you could tern an AS class into a Thermo dummy data var. Basically, take a VO and turn it into a dummy class that populates your component. I thought this was a great idea, almost like a Java Bean. Here’s how it would work:
Say you had a Customer VO with “firstName”, “lastName”, “phoneNumber”, “id”, etc. A designer opens up thermo with their comp, drags and drops an AS file into thermo, and you get a list of properties, named after the settable fields in your class as editable properties, a-la JavaBeans. In this case, you get “First Name”, “Last Name”, “Phone Number”.
Now the designer is playing with the data, getting more involved in the process of creating the app, working with the actual data the backend programmer needs, and structuring the UI with the fields that already exist. Thermo is really really cool. Tom said: “thermo will sell a billion copies.” I don’t doubt it.
