Tips From The Masters

How to attend Adobe MAX conference for cheap

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:30:00 EDT

I’d like to offer you a legal way to get more than 80% off the registration price at Adobe MAX that will take place next week in Los Angeles. But you have to move fast!

Enterprise Flex: Debunking Urban Myths

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:45:00 EDT

I got an email from an enterprise architect considering Adobe Flex as a platform for Web application development in their organization. This email contained a well prepared list of questions/remarks/concerns that many of enterprise Web architects may face. That’s why I decided to publish my short answers to these questions. I didn’t change the wording of the questions/ statements.

Know Your Flex Proxy

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:00:00 EDT

Flex framework includes a pretty useful object that deserves more attention: mx.util.ObjectProxy. You can wrap your object (i.e. Person) into this proxy which will obediently report on all changes that are happening to this instance of a person. If you subclass ObjectProxy, you can even add a new behavior to the wrapped object without touching a single line of its code.

A Singleton That Flex Developers Must Know About

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:30:00 EDT

Each real-world software developer knows at least one design pattern – Singleton. Flex has some specifics in implementing Singletons due to lack of private constructors in ActionScript, but the goal of this little writeup is not to show you how to implement Singleton, but rather to discourage you from doing this because each Flex application already has a singleton – just use it.

Creating and Accessing Pop-up Menus in AIR Applications with Flash CS4

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:00:00 EDT

Reading my previous AIR tutorials, you’ve worked with menus that are associated with tangible elements of your applications, such as the following: Context menus that are activated on objects on the stage Context menus associated with icons in the system tray or dock bar Menus associated with windows and menus of the application itself AIR applications also allow you to create pop- up menus . These are native menus like all the other ones you’ve seen so far—the only difference is that pop- up menus aren’t natively associated with any element on the interface of the application. It’s up to the developer to define and implement the logic and the way in which a pop- up menu can be activated

Agile Chronicles #1: What is Agile Based On?

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:00:00 EDT

This article is about what processes I came from, my definition of the Agile/Scrum process, and how stress has been spread out throughout the project vs. at the end. Stay tuned for #2 in the Agile Chronicles series where I elaborate on the re-factoring challenges.

Agile Chronicles #4: P to the Oh to the Sea, Strategy, and Design Challenges

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 04:00:00 EDT

The Agile Chronicles is a set of articles documenting experiences of the author using an Agile process (Scrum) in software development on his current Flex project.

Agile Chronicles #2: Code Refactoring

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 07:02:00 EST

This entry is about the joy of coding quickly, finding the balance between getting something done quickly vs. architecting for the future, and dealing with the massive amount of re-factoring that’s entailed in iterative Scrum development.

Adding Enum Support to Adobe Flex AMF Protocol

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:15:00 EDT

Flex has a short learning curve for Java developers, who will find that there are a lot of familiar language constructs and patterns. It also provides excellent remoting capabilities for Java programmers, allowing transparent data transfer between ActionScript and Java 1.4 data types. With Java version 5 and above in production for a while now you have a lot of Java data structures that use enum and need marshaling to/from the Flex applications. This article provides a working example of the ActionScript language extension for an enum data type.

Job Interviews: Adobe Flex and Flash Career Guidance

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:45:00 EDT

Some things that I learned early in my career that originally helped me succeed, I believe are now hurting me in job interviews. One of the pros to typing via dynamic languages and forgiving compilers such as ActionScript 1.0, Ruby, JavaScript, and others is that you can quickly code things that work. In a lot of the early agency, multimedia, and small software company work that I did, these technologies were great. They didn't get in your way, and they empowered you to quickly create programmatic solutions that were enhanced or even driven by good designers. You could hit insane deadlines, recompile changes quickly for a client, and react flexibly to ever-changing, almost fluid requirements...if any.

Multiple Inheritance in ActionScript 3.0

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 13:00:00 EST

Did you know ActionScript 3.0 supports multiple inheritance? Here's how... Multiple inheritance is actually possible with AS3, despite popular belief that it's not supported. It's not really multiple inheritance in the true sense of the word going by the strict definition... but there's a way to get the job done in AS3 that behaves almost like the real thing.

Passing Parameters to Flex That Works

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 07:30:00 EDT

Here's the assignment: write a Flex application that can run against different servers (dev, uat, prod) without the need to recompile the SWF file. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the URL of the server should be passed to SWF as a parameter, and we’ll do this by using a special variable flashVars in HTML wrapper. Flex documentation suggests to include flashVars parameters in the tags Object and Embed and read them using Application.application.parameters in AS3 code. At the time of this writing this does not work. But as the ancient saying goes, “Adobe closes one door but opens another”.

ActionScript 3: Dynamic classes

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:15:00 EDT

In Java, if you've created an object from a particular class, you can use only properties and methods that were defined in this class. This is not the case in ActionScript 3. This is one of the examples of unusual (from the OOP perspective) programming techniques.

Extending Adobe Flex with Flash

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 14:45:00 EDT

While a large Flex application is loaded, the user may experience unpleasant delays, which can be used productively to logon to this application. Besides, it'll give the user perception that your application loads faster.

Code Reuse - Pros and Cons

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 10:15:00 EDT

Depending on the scope of your project, you may have the opportunity for code reuse. The reasons you might want to do so are two-fold. First, you reduce duplication of efforts. If you have already created a hyperlink enabled CellRenderer for your DataGrid once, why do it again? Second, you create, or build upon, an ever growing utility code base. While it may not be in the 'utils' package per se, you'll soon end up with re-usable events, common GUI controls and widgets, and yes even utility classes. Whether by merely being in a different folder means the client doesn't own it is up to you or your sales team.