ActionScript

At our last Flex Meetup, Adam Spektor did an overview of AS3Signals (by Robert Penner) which brought up some interesting questions about why developers would use Signals over regular Events.  I decided that I would test it out and benchmark both methods, meanwhile evaluating the pros and cons of each.  To be able to test the results, I created a FlexUnit project that would test the creation and dispatch of one event, and then the dispatch of a thousand events.  In one test case, I would test a single Signal and in the other test case I would just create a central EventDispatcher to try to mimic Signals.  You can find the project here, but the real important part is the execution time of each one.  Read more...

Last week at the Lab49 sponsored Flex vs. Silverlight Bakeoff, my team (Flex) had an issue when we wanted to create a simple text input component with a prompt.  This isn’t something that I use particularly often, but for some reason I had a memory of some kind of prompt property.  To my surprise however, Flex 4.1 did not have a prompt property on the TextInput component, even though it is a fairly sought after feature.  Read more...

Anyone remember Saffron?  I was never certain if this project was ever going to come to fruition, so lately I was thinking excessively about making my own.  I started searching for inspiration in other UML tools so I could design a better user interface.  Low and behold, I stumble across UML4AS, a brand spanking new project that does just what I was planning of doing.

It integrates completely with Eclipse (and Flash Builder) and has this neat feature called CodeSync that makes sure your model and code is always persisted between each other.  In other words, everything works together in an integrated workflow to save you time.  Read more...

Some of you might of seen my past post about the FirebugLogger class.  It was an easy way to have text show up in the Firebug console in Firefox and has proven itself quite useful.  However, since I’ve been using Parsley a lot lately I needed something new to show the output of Parsley in Firebug.  Parlsey uses the native Flex logging framework (like TraceTarget) when you specify it in the config.

What I’ve done is extend TraceTarget and include some code so that any output goes to Firebug.  Simple enough, but very useful when you don’t have to have your debugger always running to see the output.  Read more...

That’s right, it’s here, everyone rejoice.

When I moved here from Ottawa I thought to myself that NYC would be full of Flex gurus. Sadly, that is not the case. I’ve met many developers, but very few experts in the field.

This is my way to try and change that. I’m hoping that this will become the place where Flex developers of all skill levels meet, discuss, share and learn from each other.

If that interests you, join the group and come out to our inaugural meet June 7th. Pizza will be provided.

For the last six months I have been working on a rather large enterprise application that uses parsley as it’s main Dependency Injection Framework. This has led to many complex class’ that contain multiple injected models, VO and other elements. Recreating these items inside test harness can become very cumbersome if you have to create a large injection heirarchy. Consider the following example.

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I recently discovered that you can create custom components that can appear under your own company/personal folder inside Flash/Flexbuilder design view. Normally any custom component you create will appear under the Custom folder in the Components View and well thats not very good for branding now is it. In addition you also get an actual size representation of your component in Design view rather than just an empty box outline. For example the first image is the default and the second the custom.

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Flash vs Silverlight vs HTML5; a no-holds barred grudge match is brewing in this industry.  It will divide developers and companies where there was little contention in the past.  I doubt that this will end in a fatality, but the injuries will most likely fall to Adobe because of its current dominance in the field.  Each technology has its pros and cons, and multiple providers can co-exist, but companies need a reason to choose one over another. I predict most of the debate will be based around the development process; ease of development, quick prototyping, effectiveness of tools offered, development environments, unit testing, system integration, as well as application design and planning. If a company can make great applications in less time, it means that they can make more money.  Read more...

A few months ago, I was working on a project that needed a CMS backend to create content that will be displayed in Flex. We used a RichTextEditor component to create appropriate HTML so that it would display like we wanted to on the frontend.
The problem with this approach is that we needed our [...]

A few months ago, I was working on a project that needed a CMS backend to create content that will be displayed in Flex. We used a RichTextEditor component to create appropriate HTML so that it would display like we wanted to on the frontend.

The problem with this approach is that we needed our application to be re-themeable between different clients that would be using this product, which meant that we also needed a way to style the html content without having to redo the html itself.

 Read more...

I have been playing with ActionScript 3 lately and I will say upfront that I like it, it does what it’s supposed to do pretty well: Provide a thoughtfully designed language targeted specifically at the Flash platform.
But it has also been touted as an object oriented language with optional compile-type checking and so I had certain expectations when I took the language for a spin, with a eye towards developing large (as in a few thousand classes) application.  Read more...