Flex comes with a full spectrum of components, but once in a while you get hit with a request to do something that is difficult to shoehorn into what already exists, but seems even more difficult to do as...
Last week, I wrote about the Lazy Loading design pattern. There's not much written about its opposite, Eager Loading, in ActionScript 3. The reason for this is simple–true eager loading can't be done in AS3 itself, it has to be...
Wikipedia defines Lazy Loading as "a design pattern commonly used in computer programming to defer initialization of an object until the point at which it is needed." Typically, we do this to make an RIA application more responsive–since we're not...
I always enjoy Jesse Freeman's Flash Art of War column, and this week's, "Dynamically Creating(/Instantiating) Classes from XML," was especially intriguing. The thing that stuck out to me about that post is that if you are creating objects dymanically, you...
I didn't get a chance to go to MAX this year, unfortunately. But since my husband did make it, and he is both a Community Expert and a User Group Manager, you can probably imagine that I got an earful...
Even though stateful skins are simple to understand, they are not well documented and there are a few quirks both of stateful skins and of how some of the components work that meant that the concept is easier said than done. So maybe by joining me on my journey you can benefit from the simplicity and power without hitting all of the headaches. Instead of a full-blown tutorial, I thought I'd share a few concepts about how I approached the problem of creating a stateful skin and what I learned in the process.
I'm as excited as anyone about the prospect of Flash Catalyst, but I recently discovered that skinning in Flex 3 is down right easy. When I first was learning Flex, I had Studio 8, so I managed to completely overlook...
When I was first learning Flex, I really struggled with using the component life cycle. I was really lucky, since I was asked to provide the "newbie eyes" for an article in Flex Authority magazine. I learned a lot from...
Last week, I discussed how to see your installed 32-bit ODBC drivers on 64-bit Windows. I'd like to talk a bit more about why 32 -bit ODBC drivers, especially tha Microsoft Access Jet Driver, doesn't work by default on Internet...
We all know that Microsoft Access is not the right choice for enterprise databases. But there's no doubt that sometimes it is the right choice. Whether it's a quick prototype or an application that needs to have roughly the same...
If you have had an opportunity to look at the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) you could see that there is a huge opportunity to do interesting multi-user applications without needing to write all of the server side code. However... Continue Reading
Overview Purpose of this article The goal of this article is to help you gain a better understanding of the Decorator design pattern. The Decorator pattern is used to attach additional responsibilities to an object at run time dynamically. Decorators... Continue Reading
The proliferation of cellular phones has revolutionized the way we communicate with one another and is the foundation for a more mobile lifestyle. Adobe, a long time player in rich internet applications, wanted to, once again, be an active participant.... Continue Reading
Adobe just released public information about AIR 2.0 and added new capabilities that better tie with the operation systems which gives your application more control while increasing performance. The new version will be deployed on Flash player 10 using Flex... Continue Reading
Facebook Application Development
@InsideRIA on Twitter