Well I didn't get to write this until this morning, but I wanted to reflect briefly on the first day of Max. This being not only my first Max but my first conference in general. I've got to say that overall I have been pretty impresed.
James Ward has a little tool called "Is It Flex" that will tell you if a given SWF file was made with Flex providing you know the URL to the SWF. James uses the SWFDump utility from the SDK and looks for some header info that the Flex compiler places in the SWF. A while ago I experimented with an ancillary tool on my site which attempted to find the URLs to all the SWFs in the page for you and check them all at once.
Here's a little tidbit that will be old-hat to any Flex/Flash people out there, but as a CF guy, I found it pretty interesting. Most ColdFusion programmers have probably heard of implicit getters and setters as a pattern some have adopted in CFML (and others seem to vehemently oppose). While learning Flex, I have found that ActionScript 3 also supports implicit getting and setting but it means something completely different that what I had expected.
I was just staring a a piece of ActionScript code trying to figure out why the two date objects I was comparing were not coming up equal. I'm ashamed to say I didn't notice the problem at first because I had mistakenly typed
Two equals signs ("==") work a little better than one since the single operator obviously changes the value of the former operand. :) Once I fixed that, I found my real problem.
In case you are wondering, "Axes" is the plural form of "Axis" and it is pronounced "Axees" with a long e as in "see". Perhaps you have never pondered that one, but it's been driving me crazy. In this post I wanted to demonstrate a little experiment I did tonight to try and not duplicate as much formatting when it came to my charting data tips. I can already think of a few problems with it, but I wanted to try anyway.
Well, once again this is a pretty basic post of information readily available on the Internet. It took me seemingly forever to piece it all together, so I am blogging it to cement it in my mind and hopefully help someone else down the road. This week I have conquered the formatting of my X and Y axis labels for my charts. As usual, the hoops are a little bulky to jump through when you just want to add a very simple bit of formatting, but the flexibility is awesome.
I feel dumb saying this, but I am having a heck of a time finding consistent information about Flex 3 classes. I am just starting in Flex and it isn't TOO hard to find an example out there that is close to what you are doing, but often times examples don't cover all the bases, and I'll need to look up a method to get its exact signature. (How many arguments, what type, etc) Generally, I'll turn to the livedocs for this, but I have been wasting a lot of time Googling and I don't think it should be this hard.
If you have been programming in Flex for a while, I have nothing earth-shattering to say here. Nevertheless, having just figured it out I wish to write it down as much for my sake as anyone else. My latest task, simple as it was, involved formatting the numbers in several of my Data Grids as dollars and cents.
I have been enjoying my dip into Flex so far. Sometimes you don't notice habits until you have to change them. One rut I've gotten into over the years is the procedural way web-based apps have gotten be thinking about programming.
So in the past 3 days I have been trying Flex I've had several out of memory errors that crashed my browser. I don't know if it is my operating system, my browser, Flash in general, or Flex, but it sucks. For the record I am using Windows XP Pro, IE 7, Flash 9, and Flex 3. This is what happens: As I develop, I keep hitting save in Flex Builder, waiting for it to recompile in the background, then Alt-tabbing over to IE and whacking F5 to refresh. Well, over the course of 2 or 3 hours of doing this, the memory usage for iexpolore.exe just keeps climbing and climbing as though there is a memory leak or garbage collection isn't happening.
