toytopia

BMW goes social media: I’m really happy to announce the launch of my first facebook application. The application was developed to support the other marketing activities for the brandnew BMW X1. As this car will be promoted also via Twitter, Youtube and of course Facebook.

Lucky for me the Facebook As3 API was released just as I started setting up the project. So we didn’t need any PHP wrapper solution to use the features of the application API. So our PHP backend was build on a minimum of Facebook-API constraints.

For the frontend part I used Flex with PureMVC. On the backend part we choose the Zend Framework as it includes the Zend AMF library which is now officially supported by Adobe.

See Clipbox application!
See BMW X1 Fanpage!

My first Flex project for a paying client came to life with new car configurator for BMW flagship. This configurator was developed for the german market only.

My main responsibility in this project was the V of MVC. Meaning that I took a deep dive into component development and the whole life cycle design of those components. Quickly learning that developing components in MXML is fast but when it comes to performance there is no way around to write them in pure AS3.

Having started with 2 core developers we ended with up to 8 developers working simultanously to hold the narrow timeline given by BMW. Really crazy but it worked out quite well.

See it!

Actually I wanted to gather some information about the well known Cairngorm framework to see how it works and what principles the implementation follows. But quickly I found out that there might be a new star on the horizon to admire:

“PureMVC is a lightweight framework for creating applications based upon the classic Model, View and Controller concept.