Coder's Revolution - Flash

MVC Question: What Should The Controller Pass The View?

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:08:00 -0500

I think the bane of development planning can be those conversations where you personify your framework and start debating about what a service should "know", whose "job" a particular operation is, or what the handler should "care" about. This is one of those sort of questions, but I'll keep it brief since I'm more interested in your opinions than my ramblings. [More]

Bolt, Centuar, Flash Catalyst, and Gumbo features

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:56:00 -0500

This Wednesday Adobe's Kevin Hoyt spoke in Kansas City to a captive audience of about 75 people including ColdFusion programmers, HTML/CSS builders, and designers. The meeting was great. It also included Jack Stack BBQ and shwag from Uhlig, Emfluence, and Tek Systems to name a few. Kevin didn't drop any bombs I hadn't heard about yet, but there were definitely a few things I learned about Adobe's up-and-coming products. Here's a quick overview of my notes: [More]

Adobe's Kevin Hoyt is coming to Kansas City!

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:55:00 -0500

If you live in or around Kansas City, Kevin Hoyt is coming to speak about ColdFusion, Bolt, Flex, and Flash Catalyst this Wednesday. I am pretty excited. First of all, to receive some local attention from Adobe. Secondly, to get to hear Kevin (Adobe Platform Evangalist). Thirdly, they are promising BBQ. What else could be better? [More]

New Flex 4 Tutorials Available

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:34:00 -0500

Flex 4 (Gumbo) is now in Beta and new training tutorials are available from Trilemetry. There a handful of new articles you can read on Adobe's site and follow along with to learn Flex 4 with ColdFusion! [More]

Max Day 1: Overview of My Schedule

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:20:00 -0500

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. [More]

How To Tell If That Cool Flash Movie Was Made With Flex

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:44:00 -0500

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. [More]

ActionScript Implicit Getters And Setters Are Growing On Me

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:09:00 -0500

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. [More]

ActionScript Date Comparison

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:29:00 -0500

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 if(date1 = date2) 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. [More]

Flex Charting: Format Your Data Tips The Same As Your Axes

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:20:00 -0500

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. [More]

Flex Charting: Format Your X And Y Axis

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:00:00 -0500

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. [More]

Formatting My DataGrid Cells For Currency

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:51:00 -0500

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. [More]

Flex Has Forced Me To Think Differently About My Code

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 13:40:00 -0500

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. [More]

Flex And IE Out Of Memory Error

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 04:56:00 -0500

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. [More]

Flex and Inconsistent Object Initialization

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 02:42:00 -0500

Flex objects extending the UIComponent class have two events that fire during their creation process. The "initialize" event fires when the object is starting to be created, but before its children are created. "creationComplete" fires after that object and all its children have been created. There is a great post and example here. I found this out while trying to figure out an intermittent error I was getting when loading my Flex app that was related to trying to access an object prior to its creation. [More]

Flex "Permission Denied" when run locally

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:37:00 -0500

Well, to add to my list of interesting errors encountered with Flex; yesterday I started getting a JavaScript "Permission Denied" when I tried to run my app. The app would run fine but I would get that error every time the page loaded. After commenting out a bunch of stuff, I realized it had started when I added the mx:TabNavigator tag. I finally traced the error down to some JavaScript in the history/historyframe.html file which controls deep linking. [More]