Hi everyone,
I’ve been working on the version 2 of Soma and its generator. I’m pretty busy so I didn’t post for a while, but I’m going to give you some news today.
We’ve just released at Less Rain the Neoderma international website. It is not a “crazy-kick-your-ass-3D-website”, nothing is complicated there, but it has a very nice and clean “look and feel” and a complex CMS where everything can be changed (structure, content, animations, language, and so on). The content is pretty big so it is a complicated site in terms of data. Neoderma is a multi-language site (translations are not done yet but will appear in the future).
I’m talking about Neoderma here because it has fully been built with Soma v1 and the framework has been a great help (and also a joy) to keep a strong and solid structure. Soma has been very effective in responding to (almost) whatever I needed, and because Soma is very flexible, it worked perfectly with a site where everything can be changed via a CMS.
I’m not allowed to give any source code of course, but I can advice Soma users if they wonder how to do something. Soma v1 is lacking documentation and examples but this will be greatly improved in the v2.
About the v2 I’m working on, it is in a pretty good shape. The framework is almost done. I’ll make the full documentation before releasing it. It is easier to use and more consistent, not at all completely different though. Templates disappeared as we could do without them, a real node parser has been built to dynamically instantiate classes (custom or built-in) straight from the XML, a new page mode appears for Flash IDE users making you able to build something in no time, SomaLoader implemented, and more features we’ll see at the release.
SomaUI, the generator is done at 80% and will make you able to build the XML Site definition with a friendly user interface, as well as exporting and compile the sources created. You’ll even be able to build something very quickly from SomaUI, without knowing the framework and opening a documentation.
Thanks for your patience, it is on its way 
Hopefully, I’ll post more if I can get a bit more time!
Happy development.
Entries (RSS)
April 7th, 2009 at 3:46 am
thx for your time+nice engine, hope it not so long waiting ;D
April 8th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Neoderma looks great man
keep it up with your work
May 18th, 2009 at 11:22 am
thank,
I come across your site today, I was googleing for a decent as3 layout system, and I’ve founded probably what I was looking for since a long time. I’ll give Soma a try for sure.
and Neoderma is a nice work.
May 18th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
hello,
first problem sorry, when I try to Export a test project from somaui: “You must you a flex SDK without space in the path”. I’m on Mac and the flex sdk path is: “/Application/Adobe/Adobe Flex builder 3/sdk/….”. I hope it helps for a next release.
May 18th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
yes that’s a normal error alert for that version, the path space problem on the Mac was quite tricky but I solved it in the version 2 (not available to public yet but will be released soon).
For now, just put your SDK in a folder without space in the path.
By the way, Soma is a MVC Framework that has a layout manager: BaseUI.
You can use BaseUI without Soma if you need to.
Quick tip if you use Soma: a property “baseUI” is available in each pages (class extending com.soma.view.Page) for a quick and easy access to the layout classes. A global one is accessible from anywhere that way: Soma.getInstance().baseUI
Romu