Jun 5

Why I’m developing with Yahoo Astra

2

Yahoo Astra is Yahoo’s answer to the components that are missing from flash, such as: tree menu, alert windows, carousel, charts, auto suggest, menu, menu bar, tab bar and layout managers.

Many of these elements can be found in Flex Flash Builder, but that won’t do you much good if you are developing in the flash IDE.

I’m using these components in a few projects I’m working on at ACS. By using Astra I’m getting the not insignificant benefit of standing on the shoulders of some very smart and accomplished programmers. Yahoo Astra components have numerous features which accommodate most common situtations and the components can of course be extended to fit your sites specific needs.

You can find Yahoo Astra at: http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/astra-flash/

There seems to be a lot going on with flash this past week. Adobe has posted Flash Builder 4 on labs along with Flash Catalyst aka Thermo. This is seems like a good time to check out labs.adobe.com

"Why I’m developing with Yahoo Astra" was published on June 5th, 2009 and is listed in Uncategorized.

Follow comments via the RSS Feed | Leave a comment | Trackback URL

  • Morcvert

    is there any performance issue ?

  • Anonymous

    @Morcvert it’s been a couple of years since we built our carousel. The only part of our site which uses Astra components is our homepage carousel. I certainly would not use flash again given that the current landscape which has changed very significantly in the intervening time.

    That said I’m currently build some tooling to evaluate our carousels performance from our end users perspective. From our developers workstations on avg I believe the preload for the carousel itself is aprox .5-1 sec in parrallel to other site content. which is not too bad. Of course that time does not include the actual slide content. Once we’ve had a change to get some user data collected I’ll post again.

    The Astra components I’ve used are of good quality, though somewhat wheighty.