I am so excited to finally be able to speak about our latest project launch! Monday night (12-07-2010) we (Rockfish) officially launched our nations health statistics (http://statehealthstats.americashealthrankings.org) for United Health Foundation. The culmination of 8 weeks of in depth Flash development utilizing a whole slew of different technologies making for one impressive 3D experience for the user.
From the beginning, we knew given the size and scale of this project, Flex would be our base framework for building out the experience. We wanted a strong core to be able to compartmentalize every aspect via the architecture. Given the complexity of the application, we blended a miriad of architectural frameworks but used Cairngorm as the shell MVC. Beyond the standard view (of MVC), we broke development down even further to isolate the code controlling elements within the view via presenters. Doing so allowed several developers to work independently of each other on the same component. A beautiful display of teamwork and collaboration which we are definately honing within our work space.
We utilized Degrafa for all our skinning as we were tasked with building the entire application to target flash player 9. A major drawback given the advances in technology that come with flash 10. For all the 3D, we went with Away3D based on the ease of use compared to other 3D engines we've worked with in the past. By far, the experience with Away3D went significantly smoother than anything we've ever done to this point.
In all, we were able to stick almost precisely with the original designs with very little variance due to the collaboration supported in Adobe's Creative Suite 5. From the top down, the development of this experience went better than any of our expectations.