Juan Sanchez RMAUG Degrafa Notes

Posted At : May 21, 2008 6:25 PM | Posted By : Admin
Related Categories: ria

On May 8th, 2008, Juan Sanchez joined the Rocky Mountain Adobe User Group to give a presentation on Degrafa. Degrafa, short for Delcrative Graphics Framework, is a Flex framework for tag based drawing and graphics manipulation. Juan Sanchez is part of the Degrafa team, as well as the creator of Scalenine and experience architect for Effective UI.

Here are my notes from the presentation.

The Basics:

Degrafa was created for typical things you'd need drawing objects for, but allowing access via mxml. "Programmatic graphics" is the key term to conceptualize the framework.
Many geometric objects available (ie circle, polygon, etc), as well as the ability to roll your own.
Library objects are classes of shapes available (eg arrows) to maintain consistent look and feel across applications.
Fills can be applied as solids, gradients, bitmaps, blends, or, unique to degrafa, complex fill, which allows fills to be stacked (eg linear gradient on top of bitmap fill.)
Degrafa will allows you to use 3 number colors instead of the usual 6 hexadecimal notation. Colors can also be specified in an informal notation (eg purple.)

The Exciting Stuff:

Allows binding properties of graphics objects to other flex components. Binding is key to data visualization.
The end targets can be set as an array, which allows multiple targets.
Fills and strokes can be placed in separate component to allow centralized control of display.
Degrafa can use SVG path data, which essentially is an xml markup for a graphics. SVG data, because it is text, can be stored in a database.
Degrafa offers tools to increase productivity like Repeaters, Derivatives, and Cloning.
Advanced CSS Support extends the limits of what is available in flex display. Borders can be created with different rounded corners, background images can be positioned and stacked.

For more info on Degrafa: