All Things Flex, Flash, and ActionScript

This one crept on me and while I thought I was on the right track it wasn’t until I came across a tech-note on Adobe’s site that finally led me down the right path which incidentally I only found by accident. The main issue was a SecurityViolation Error which is common place in dealing with accessing data in different domains. Usually we all know about this, and is fixed in implementing the correct subdomain accessor in the crossdomain.xml however even after it was deployed the app was still throwing this error, which made me now think the wildcard initiator doesn’t work as intended.

It turns out that not only does your crossdomain need to have the allow access from node, if the page and requested data use different protocols that a secure attribute must be added.

When your application is in HTTP and you want HTTPS data use:

WHen your application is in HTTPS and you want HTTP data use:

Getting a tree to represent data in XML is fairly straight forward, and most examples use this as the default. However, what happens when you have an object tree and want to be able to represent that as the descriptor you built but also easily allow drag-drop operations (especially in cases where you need the parent object reference)?

It turns out writing a new DataDescriptor class is not necessary (as I learned the hard way), but it was necessary to figure out what they are trying to do with ancestors and child objects. While there is no defined interface for it, the data descriptor tries to figure out if the current object is parented by looking for a property called children.

So if you implement your object class with this property as an ICollectionView (it will convert to a ListCollectionView -so you might as well go the extra step to do it yourself), you’re all set.

A quick example of a photo gallery using the standard SDK SliderIn a world of visuals (well at least our little world of RIA development), this is freakishly basic. [Edit: After trying to get this to show up as an inline swf using WP-SWFObject, I gave up on it since it refuses to put up the content, so instead it’ll have to be a retarded link for now.]

So essentially while it works, the control doesn’t tell you anything about what you’re about to see, other than an index of the photo which lets face it isn’t that helpful. Knowing previously there is a reference property to the sliderDataTipClass, I began to look up how to implement my own. Essentially all I want is something relatively basic that shows a scaled-down thumbnail of the image (you can get a lot more detail out of it once you know the basic mechanics of how to set one up). (more…)

Sometimes you start on a project, and get far enough into it, that it just seems like it shouldn’t be that hard. For me, this was precisely the case with recreating a child past-time favorite game of mine: Elevator Action. This started off in Flash 7, and the reasoning behind it at the time was to create a complex environment scroller and to release the source for other developers to see how things like this are programmed. Getting bogged down by work, and generally life itself, not to mention the frustrating limitations of AS2 at the time; I put it down for awhile thinking I’d get back to it.

Well, Flash 9 is now here and it’s probably been 2 years or so since I last touched this (like dogs, it’s at least 14+ programming years). AS3 has finally brought us more into line with what the rest of the OOP world expects with new initializers, additional accessors and the such, but this now means I’m faced with the same problem everyone else has in revisiting old projects: Do I try to monkey patch the old code, or start over? (more…)

So you’re interested in working from home. Think long and hard about the challenges that lay ahead of you; this essentially is just one developer’s tale from experience. Zero regurgitated material from some perky career columnist who’s above the fray and isn’t in tune with how it really works.

This one goes out to the handful of developers (probably can count them on two hands) that have a family (with kids: pets don’t count), and for various different reasons (housing market for one -no one wants to loose $20k) are unable to or are not interested in moving to cater to the employment flavor of the month. You may also be in a position similar to mine where you don’t live in CA, NY, or MA. It is what it is, but those three states are always going to hold a vast majority of cards when it comes to RIA development. This little fact holds both your advantage and disadvantage at the same time, and very little of it has to do with you. Economic supply and demand, but more on that later. (more…)

It’s taken a fair amount of time in order to build this thing in my native language, and even pushed me outside my comfort zone to tackle missing links in the connectivity of php-MySQL.

There is still a ways to go in getting everything polished, but the core functionality is finally there. Source will eventually be released as it gets closer to the beta / release state. Current application size is hovering right around 700-800k, this is in large part due to the fact all images are still using the [Embed()] macro and not loading from an external source.

There are times when it becomes important that we step back from our work to really understand when / where / how patterns are applied. However, where I think many of us fall short, is more importantly is when NOT to.

Like any great pattern that is meant to simplify and organize, they can abused and overused. Remember, a pattern is really nothing more than a general solution to a particular problem set that has been previously solved. So for many cases, this is a godsend, because it means less time can be spent on the implementation and more time can be spent on the UI, aesthetics, and over all product improvements. (more…)

Depending on your specific responsibilities, in most cases, most of us programmers do not have to hash out the ideas of what becomes an effective design or work flow in the project or product of what we work on. Thankfully. However, if it is, then the following becomes a lot more common: where Engineering will say to Marketing, this idea just isn’t going to work and we’ll need another 2 weeks further from our already tight deadline. OK so I’m not dealing with any sort of hard deadline other than just wanting to have some sort of completion to the first stage, I did have to go back and come up with ‘a better way to use things.’ Notice I didn’t say ‘do things.’ (more…)

Not that I have any serious comments to any particular app, but it is interesting to see what other people’s take to user experience is when coming up with a RIA for interacting primarily in a passive way (mostly reading vs. active data entry on the user’s part). A few of them have even taken the time to really pay attention to the aesthetics of how their application looks and content is delivered.

I suppose mine can be added to this list in about a month or so, at least in alpha form. Once I get it mostly bug free, I’ll start working on aspects of being able to ‘build/modify/style’ your own with source.

For anyone who’s curious, here’s a snapshot of where it currently stands, but still has some styles / skins / icons to be done.

FlexPress snapshot pre-alpha

Mike Britton’s RandomUSA

Algirdas’: Incito

Ak33m’s http://ak33m.com/?cat=2

Arpit’s http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/?p=51

In the last post, I mentioned being able to overcome WordPress’s limitation of white space stripping so that a code formatter looks half way readable. The one I present here, primarily takes into consideration how a Java/C-based programmer would format it with rules like the brackets create the tabbing breaks inline: ie public function foo():void {, instead of the bracket being placed at the next line like others prefer. This is a matter of taste, but in the case of writing rules it actually makes it slightly easier to distinguish newlines instead of having to write RegExp’s with forward look up rules using ?: (more…)