FCG officially discontinued, grab the PureMVC multicore release

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Published by david_deraedt on February 6th, 2009 in Generator, Flex, FCG

That's it, I've made up my mind. I'm giving up FCG.

Yesterday, Yeshay Weiss kindly sent me by email a modified build of FCG/FGL supporting PureMVC multicore. This is great, and I'll take the opportunity to thank him for his work and for making it public. You can download it from FCG homepage. The install badge still points to the previous build, though.

I tried to merge his work with the current trunk of FCG, but I had to face the fact that my code is so bloated, so badly architectured, that it would take days to complete. I don't have that time nor the energy to do so anymore.

I've already expressed my doubts before, and time has only confirmed what I had in mind. We (Flex/AIR developers) need code generation tools, especially when using architecture frameworks. But, in a real iterative dev cycle context, FCG is simply not the right tool.

In my defense, Adobe AIR, by nature, is not very well suited for that kind of job. As much as I love that platform, the fact that it cannot launch 3rd party apps make it a poor candidate for being integrated in an agile context, being a continuous integration platform or not. More importantly, it's really hard to make it possible to integrate other developers work, as dynamic libraries.

But the truth is I should have taken these limitations into account from the start, and make a smaller, simpler tool which fits better to the AIR platform, while remaining useful for small teams and projects. I aimed too high, too fast. I still think such a tool could be done, but FCG is not a good foundation for this. Today, if you're looking for a Flex Cairngorm or PureMVC code generator, I'd recommend taking a look at ANT based tools like eric feminella's cairngen, and pure-mvc-gen.

I'd like to thank everyone who gave FCG a try. I'm glad some of you found it useful. I apologize for those who felt disappointed by it. I don't have a precise install number, since I didn't track installs the way I did for ADM and Lita, but I think it should be something between 1000 and 2000 installs, which I guess is not that bad.

I'll maintain FCG homepage, sources, and air file as long as needed. And of course, I'm still available for questions or remarks by email, twitter, comments, whatever.

Voilà. No regrets. I'll try to do better next time. ;)

Ben Dalton (not verified) on February 06th 2009

David, First off, I used FCG for a handful of projects with GREAT results. Thanks for all of your hard work on the project. It was as useful as it was ambitious... a rare combination. While I'm sad to see it go, I'm really glad you decided to openly discontinue the product. I much prefer seeing this type of message rather than an abandoned project. Keep up the good work

david_deraedt on February 06th 2009

Thanks a lot Ben. I really appreciate.

gurufaction (not verified) on February 06th 2009

I know how you feel David. I created the asDox project in an effort to utilize code generation based off meta-data embedded in Actionscript classes. I was able to generate PHP backend and flex gui code based off of annoted as3 classes but it just didn't feel right. My current code generation project is called CodeEvolution. It uses a YAML description file and can generate any frontend code (Flex,HTML,PHP) with any backend code (C#,PHP,Java). It is still a work in progress with not public repo but I hope to make it public as soon as I finish using it on some of my current projects.

david_deraedt on February 06th 2009

Great, I'm looking forward to knowing more about this new project.

Tannoy (not verified) on February 09th 2009

Bonjour, Merci pour ton appli FCG que j'ai utilisé avec Cairngorm. Je m'intéresse actuellement à PureMVC et j'ai suivi ton conseil quand à l'utilisation de pure-mvc-gen en tant que générateur de code. Utilisant Flex Builder, j'ai vu que l'on pouvait utiliser le generator sans passer par Ruby. L'as-tu déjà fait et as-tu été confronté à une erreur de chemin des templates ? Merci d'avance pour ta réponse. Tannoy

david_deraedt on February 09th 2009

(I'd rather answer in English) Hi, Sorry, I never actually used pureMVC gen, so I can't answer your template path error. I've just heard good things about generator, so I thought it was worth mentioning.

Tannoy (not verified) on February 10th 2009

Thank you anyway

Arul Kumaran (not verified) on February 12th 2009

Every event I get to speak about code generation I'm proudly mentioning FCG, and now I hear this :( I can understand your frustrations and will put in some efforts to change that :) Regards, Arul Kumaran

Sven Dens (not verified) on March 02nd 2009

David, Your humidity is almost cynical to me, as I must say your efforts for educating and helping out the community ("us") have always been amazing. I'm a follower of your blog for about two years now, and it's always a joy to end up on your web page again and read about all the new exiting stuff you're dealing with. FCG, albeit not a perfect tool, has sure saved me alot of monkey-work on some occasions, and I've always been happy to have it had installed. Thank you very much for the nice blog and the wonderfully usefull software you're providing us with! Sven