San Diego Flash Users Group: Flex Best Practices Presentation

To start 2009 off I gave my first presentation to an awesome group of Flash and Flex developers in San Diego. The presentation was created from the two articles I wrote in 2008 for the Adobe Developer Connection on Best Practices for Flex development. I’ve kept the Powerpoint presentation offline until now. Some of the content is a little dated but it’s probably still worth checking out. I may update this presentation with everything I’ve learned over the last year and for the upcoming changes coming in Flex 4, if time permits.

Download the Flex Best Practices Powerpoint Presentation here.

Java Programming II at UCSD

After wanting to learn more about Java for many years I decided to go back to school and take a structured class. This was the first time I’d set foot in a classroom since about 1998. It was through the UCSD Extension program but classes were held on the UCSD campus. It was pretty cool to walk around the campus and see the “college” life again after so long. In addition this was the first time I’d ever taken a class at a University, my previous college experience was at a community college. The instructor Kent Yang was really awesome and the class was killer! I learned a lot more about Java, OOP, Unit Testing and Design Patterns. This knowledge was all transferable into AS3/Flex so the experience was well worth the time and investment.

Check out the class details here.

The Flex Show Episode 71: OOP w/ Sean Moore

The Flex Show is awesome, simply stated. Jeffry Houser has done an excellent job with the podcast and I’ve been a fan for a few years now. One of my goals was to be a guest on The Flex Show and in 2009 in became a reality. I was able to put together a talk about OOP in regards to Flex and ActionScript development. The Java class helped solidify my knowledge of OOP so hopefully the talk will help others grasp some of the fundamental OO concepts. It was an honor to be on the show and I really appreciate the opportunity. Hopefully I can do another show sometime in the future. Maybe on the Mindset BCI work I’ve been doing lately.

You can listen to my talk on The Flex Show here.

Orange County Flex Users Group: Flex Best Practices Presentation

Laura Arguello was kind enough to invite me to give my Flex Best Practices preso at the OCFlex Users Group in March. This gave me a chance to visit the ASFusion office before the preso and hang out with Jeremy Saenz (aka The Flex Gangster) a bit as well. The crowd at OCFlex was really great and very patient as I got set up and had some trouble finding a room at the venue big enough for everyone. Thanks again to ASFusion and the OCFlex Users Group for inviting me to present. It was a great experience!

Technical Authoring for O’Reilly InsideRIA

2008 was a big year for me and authoring. I wrote articles for Adobe, Flash Magazine and O’Reilly’s InsideRIA. I continued the trend in 2009 by writing three featured articles for InsideRIA. Rich Tretola is one of the coolest guys I know and such a pleasure to work with. He helped me a ton with the articles I wrote this year through the good and the bad. Another person I really have to thank is Matt Chotin. His feedback on my Flex 4 article was a huge help and I really appreciate his time and input! You can check out the articles I wrote for InsideRIA below:

Round up of ActionScript 3.0 and Flex optimization techniques and practices

Overview of Flex 4 (Gumbo)

Decorator Design Pattern

Technical Reviews for Manning Publications

Reviewing books is great for a lot of reasons, it helps your writing skills, you get a preview of the books before they’re published and you get to contribute to the quality of the books being published. I do the reviews on a volunteer basis and really enjoy and appreciate the opportunity to do so. In 2009 I had the privilege of reviewing three books for Manning. They are all great titles and I encourage you to check them out.

Hello! Flex 4

Flex On Java

Flex 4 In Action

Present.ly AIR Client Development

This is one of the larger apps that I worked on completely by myself. Dave at Intridea got in touch with a request to help them refactor an existing AIR application to best practices. This project was one of the best projects I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on. The app was cool, the concept was cool and the client was cool. The Present.ly service is a private Twitter like service for businesses, if you haven’t already taken a minute to check it out I encourage you to do so. Another really awesome aspect of this project is that the codebase for the AIR app is totally open source and available for download on GIT Hub. I was able to use Cairngorm and Flex Unit on this project which I feel really helped the codebase and application’s stability and scalability. You can check out the codebase and the finished app by following the links below:

Present.ly AIR source code at GIT Hub

Present.ly AIR Client

Game Consulting and Development

A game development company contacted me for some assistence with consulting and development for a Flex and Flash based game. This was my first experience doing any game dev and it was really great. This was another awesome client. They are not public yet so there aren’t any links to share. I did want to note that game development is something that I’d like to do more of and hopefully 2010 will present more opportunities to do so.

Parsley

Learning Parsley was been on my radar for quite some time. I’ve been able to work with the framework quite a bit over the last few months and really like it so far. It’s quite a bit different than Cairngorm development but it offers more flexibility and is the preferred direction by many developers. IoC frameworks are all the rage and I am glad to be learning how to use them.

Presentation Model

This design pattern is great. It enables better unit testing for your applications and helps to decouple logic from views. Using the Presentation Model wasn’t totally clear at first but after working with it for a while I’m really beginning to like it. Having a bunch of code in MXML files wasn’t really ever all that appealing to me and using the Presentation Model really helps to separate this code out into pure AS3 classes.

ThinkGear Brain Computer Interface API

In an effort to end 2009 with a bang I released my ThinkGear API. This API enables the Neurosky Mindset Brain Computer Interface to communicate with AS3 based applications. So far I’ve been able to build a rough dashboard that uses my brainwaves as its data source. In addition I was able to tie my brainwaves into some AS3 based particle visualizations. You can see my demo video and learn more here. Control ActionScript with your mind!!!

Well here’s looking to 2010. I can’t believe it’s already been a decade since Y2K. It’s been a great decade for the Flash Platform we’ve all come a long way.

ArcGIS API for Flex
The ArcGIS API for Flex allows the creation of Rich Internet applications on top of ArcGIS Server. It is based on the free Adobe Flex framework. The Flex framework is a client-side technology that is rendered by Flash Player 9 and above, or by Adobe AIR. All Flex 3.x SDK versions are now supported.
http://resources.esri.com/arcgisserver/apis/flex/

asaudio
ASaudio is a small AS3 library dedicated to simple and efficient sound handling.
http://code.google.com/p/asaudio/

as3ansi
Library for parsing and viewing extended ASCII (IBM code page 437) into AS3 for use in Flash and Flex applications.
http://code.google.com/p/as3ansi/

ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform API
The new ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform API, fully supported by Facebook and Adobe, makes it easy to build applications that combine the strengths of the Flash Platform and Facebook Platform.
http://code.google.com/p/facebook-actionscript-api/

ascolourlovers
ColourLovers API for ActionScript 3. This library provides all the tools needed to bring palettes, colors, patterns and more from the ColourLovers API in your AS3 projects.
http://code.google.com/p/ascolourlovers/

AS3DAC
AS3DAC parses an AS3.0 class or instance file and adds asdoc documentation stubs. Follows the Flex SDK Coding Conventions where applicable.
http://code.google.com/p/as3dac/

as3flexdb
AS3FlexDB project is a open source lib that allows Adobe Flex applications to connect to a MySQL server.
http://code.google.com/p/as3flexdb/

as3growl
An ActionScript 3 API for working with the Growl notification service.
http://code.google.com/p/as3growl/

AS3 Http Client Library
An http library written on top of flash.net.Socket (and as3crypto) to be used with AIR or flash runtimes.
http://github.com/gabriel/as3httpclient

as3midilib
MIDI for ActionScript 3.0
http://code.google.com/p/as3midilib/

as3openxmlformats
ActionScript 3 lib for MS Office Open XML Formats
http://code.google.com/p/as3openxmlformats/

as3-scaffold
as3-scaffold is a lightweight as3 framework with an accompanying set of scaffolding scripts to automate the tedium of setting up new as3 projects, with support for PureMVC.
http://code.google.com/p/as3-scaffold/

as3scriptinglib
This library aims to provide an API for compiling and executing runtime ActionScript/JavaScript within the Flash client (no server required) via Adobe’s ECMAScript 4 compiler (from the Tamarin project).
http://code.google.com/p/as3scriptinglib/

as3zlib
as3 port of zlib
This is a port of JZlib to as3. Was created because as3 in Flash9 does not support deflate in ByteArray. AIR does support deflate and doesn’t need this code.
http://code.google.com/p/as3zlib/

bitly as3 api
Simple as3 implementation for bit.ly API.
http://code.google.com/p/bitly-as3-api/

Diggbe
Diggbe is a general purpose DI engine. It is first conceived for unit testing purposes (to avoid xxxSet/GetForTest). But it can also be use for runtime code to allow service dependencies to be injected.
http://code.google.com/p/diggbe/

echo-nest-flash-api
An ActionScript 3 interface for the the Echo Nest API.
http://github.com/also/echo-nest-flash-api

Etsy API Wrapper for Actionscript 3
An Actionscript 3 class that wraps the Etsy.com API.
http://thunderfarm.com/etsy/

feedmeas3
FeedMe is a low level class for sharing data between objects.
http://code.google.com/p/feedmeas3/

fuelas3svn
This is the SVN protocol implemented in AS3. This library gives you the ability to write your own SVN client completely in Flash.
http://code.google.com/p/fuelas3svn/

Gigya AS3 API
http://wiki.gigya.com/030_Gigya_Socialize_API_2.0/030_API_reference/010_Client_API_%28JavaScript%29

googleas3api
AS3 library on Googles API’s, integrate the power of Google in your Flash/Flex/AIR application (searches, translation, suggest, weather, feeds).
http://code.google.com/p/googleas3api/

Kongregate’s AS3 API
The Kongregate AS3 API allows you to extend your game to communicate with the Kongregate back-end.
http://www.kongregate.com/developer_center/docs/as3-api

KoolMoves AS3 API
http://koolexchange.com/docs/km/

lastfm as3
Actionscript 3.0 API to access the Last.fm web services.
http://code.google.com/p/lastfm-as3/

Mappy AS3 API
Thanks to Mappy AS3 API, show your users advanced visual effects (zooming with transition effects, video integrations, animations, etc.)and render maps quickly on browsers with a Flash plug-in instaled (the vast majority of Internet users).
http://api.mappy.com/en/as3

MP3tunes Music AS3/Flex/AIR API
API to implements the MP3tunes Music API. The api consists of REST interface which gives you access to all data for a user within the MP3tunes Locker service. It gives you the foundation for using the service in a AS3/Flex/AIR project.
http://code.google.com/p/mp3tunes-as3-api/

nd3d
ND3D is a simple to use AS3 3D Engine. Aimed for speed and simplicity. Target use are small 3D effects and rapid 3D testing / prototyping. The compiled size of the engine is about 10k.
http://code.google.com/p/nd3d/

netflex-as3-api
An Actionscript 3 utility library to simplify the Netflix API for Actionscript 3 based applications.
http://code.google.com/p/netflex-as3-api/

Sekati API
Sekati API is a Pure Actionscript 3.0 framework designed to bootstrap the development of flash/flex projects & applications with an emphasis on high-level functionality encapsulation. The framework provides a flexible, feature-rich xml configurable application architecture through the implementation of it’s collection of behavior-specific core display objects, controllers, managers & utilities.
http://code.google.com/p/sekati/

Soundcloud AS3 API
Universal Soundcloud API wrapper for Flash, Flex and AIR projects, written in ActionScript 3.0.
http://github.com/dasflash/Soundcloud-AS3-API/blame/1aa2d25c072309a1e931b08e88f6c7218a135be0/README

tweensy
Tweensy is an extremely efficient Actionscript 3 property tweener. Contained within Tweensy is an expansion package called Tweensy FX which allows for motion effects to be applied onto DisplayObjects.
http://code.google.com/p/tweensy/

vyana
Light-weight Cairngorm-PureMVC like framework with care about modular applications
http://code.google.com/p/vyana/

wiiflash
Communication between the Wiimote and Flash
http://code.google.com/p/wiiflash/

Flex best practices – Part 1: Setting up your Flex project article

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/best_practices_pt1.html

Flex best practices – Part 2: Development practices

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/best_practices_pt2.html

If you would still like the Powerpoint preso email me and I’ll send it along.

There was an example application that I wanted to share as well. I’ll post it on this blog in the very near future. It utilizes many of the practices and standards covered in my presentation and the articles. I’d like to provide a little info or blog post at least along with the example…soon….

I’ll be giving this same presentation on Flex Best Practices in March at the OC Flex Users Group. Thanks to ASFusion for the invite!!

Thanks again to everyone who made it out last night. The audience was really great and had great questions and a great discussion. I appreciate everyone’s time and feedback. Thanks to Dolores for all of the help getting ready for the preso too!!

You can check out the article here:

Mate: Event driven framework for Flex
by: Sean Moore, July 2008 for Flash Magazine
http://www.flashmagazine.com/Reviews/detail/mate_event_driven_framework_for_flex/