Well, due to a few conflicting interests we’ve fallen behind on the fluxus client development. I’m devoting some time to it for the next few weeks and I’d hope to have an alpha client available in December at the current rate.

The initial fluxdb is now online at http://fluxdb.fluxusproject.org. You can search and browse the libraries now and in a few days the comment system should be online too. Ratings and user tags will be added a little time after that.

Work will begin on the client shortly after, but there are a few little issues that some of the larger projects have highlighted.

Cairngorm, AsWing, Away3D and other projects are multiple libraries, and as far as fluxdb is concerned the smallest unit it deals with is a single library.

It’s pretty clear that some of these projects libraries are independent of one another, while some others depend on each other. This issue of dependency is poorly managed at the moment, and something I hoped to deal with once we had gained some community interest in the project.

Anyway, more on that later I’m sure…

I’ve had some fun scraping library metadata out of google.code hosted libraries.

As a result, I settled on markdown (as opposed to Textile) for the general description format used for a library page.

Markdown has better support for code, while textile has better support for “real” documents, tables, etc…

Converting the google code description from HTML into markdown, wasn’t supported so I’ve patched James Stewarts HTML2Textile script http://gist.github.com/82540 and added Markdown support plus an example, you can find it here. http://gist.github.com/441545.

As a result, the scrape for all (notable?) AS3 libraries hosted on Google code are now in the database, and adding new ones is a snap.

I’m thinking of different ways to assist a library author to add their project to fluxus, and the most basic support I can think of is for them to simply supply the homepage url and the location of the as3 source path in their repo.

That way I can support google code and github projects (at least) very easily. With github, it would be ideal if a library had a README.md / README.markdown page in the top level of the repo.

The Fluxus registry (aka. FluxDb) is intended to be a one-stop resource for open source Flex and Actionscript 3 class libraries and frameworks.

Combined with client side tools, the registry will help you find and install packages regardless of their source, svn, git, swc, zipped, tar, tgz … It won’t matter.

We are just getting started, so building FluxDb is our primary goal and a web based browser will be online quite soon.

If you have (or even use) an AS3 / Flex library or framework project you’d like to see in FluxDb you will be able to add them directly when the web-ui  goes live, if you can’t wait that long, you can tweet @FluxusProject, sending library name and homepage URL, so we can review and add it.

Welcome to the FluxusProject, we aim to provide a registry and client tools to manage  AS3 and Flex source libraries.

When we go live, you will be able to list, search and install libraries direct to your machine and integrate them into your projects automatically, on Windows, Mac, *nix platforms.

For the moment, we are compiling the initial list of libraries and will be tweeting progress on twitter @FluxusProject