name:

when did you first get started with computers/programming? how? why?
The first “programming” I remember was watching my dad tell DOS to count to 1000. I was impressed that computers could count that high.

The first time *I* programmed, though, was on the old 386 which sat under a table in the back of my grade six class room. After spending a few frustrating days trying to make QBASIC draw circles I found the “BASIC for Kids” book which was hidden at the back of the class’ book shelf… And it all went down hill from there.

when did you start flash/flex/AIR/AS dev?
In 2009, when I started work with my current employer. Flash was the least terrible tool we could use to build our product — a cabinetry configurator — so, being 100% of the programming team, I learned Flash.

are you practicing TDD? why/why not?
I use it when I feel it makes sense.

As far as I can tell, there is no empirical evidence that it improves quality (see, eg, chapter 12 of Making Software[0])… So I don’t see any point to using it unless I feel like I want to.

[0]: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596808303

what application development frameworks have you used? what’s your favorite?
For the AVM, only Robot Legs. It has made me happy, though, and I copy some of its patterns in my JavaScript.

In Python, I have been using Django, but I’m going to be moving off of it for my next project, as it makes life very difficult when you try to make it do things it wasn’t designed to do.

have you done any mobile dev using flash/flex/AIR?
I fiddled around with Flash for the PlayBook. That wasn’t happy times, and I won’t be doing it again.

what code editor/IDE do you use? any plugins?
For Flash, Flash Builder 4.5 with vimplugin. It’s terrible, but it’s less terrible than switching to something else.

For everything else, I use vim with heavy customizations[1].

[1]: https://bitbucket.org/wolever/dotfiles/src

what other tools do you use for flash/flex/AIR dev?
Firefox+Firebug and Charles. I would never, ever want to work without Charles.

have you attended or are you attending any conferences this year? as a speaker or attendee only?
PyCon! It’s a *great* conference. Next year will, I think, be my fifth year.

are you involved with any open source projects you’d like to talk about?
Most recently I’ve submitted some patches to redis-py[2]. It’s a nice project with a great maintainer.

[2]: https://github.com/andymccurdy/redis-py

what are your thoughts on the rebirth of JavaScript (and the HTML spec/family)?
I have a love-hate relationship with the HTML stack.

At its core, JavaScript is a great language, and I really like using it. Unfortunately it’s got an ugly exterior[3], though, which can make it frustrating to use at times… And the same goes for HTML + CSS.

Fortunately, though, there are incredible tools for working with the HTML stack (Firebug/Web Inspector, CSS frameworks, CSS compilers, JS compilers, etc), which is why I would take HTML over Flash in a second, any day of the week (eg, debugging layout issues in Flex is killer, because every change requires a rebuild + re-run… Where as, with Firebug, changes can be made instantly).

[3]: http://blog2.codekills.net/archives/89-Equality-in-JavaScript.html

what version of flex are your working with/targeting? 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5?
3.5. The project was started when 3.5 was the new hotness, so that’s what I used.

what other programming languages do you know/use?
In an average week, I use Python, ActionScript, HTML, JavaScript and usually a little bit of Bash, just for good measure.

what do you do when you’re not writing code?
Ride my motorcycle (DR-Z 400SM) and play games with friends (recently, Agricola and Le Harve have been popular).

I’d like to send a huge thanks to Doug Reynolds for inviting me to present at the user group. I’d also like to send a huge thanks to everyone that attended the presentation both at the user group and remotely via Connect. A big shout out to Stray for the help reviewing the presentation content and also providing a quote for the slideshow!!

Lastly, a HUGE thanks to Roy Osherove for the inspiration and fantastic content both in his book The Art of Unit Testing and his videos.

I hope my presentation helps people get started with TDD and TDD Kata. If you have any questions about TDD please don’t hesitate to post a comment or hit me up on twitter.

Here’s some more info about the book pulled from Amazon.

I’ve been using SourceMate for a little while and there are some really powerful, time saving features. There are some handy functions like comment/uncomment all for classes. This is a good time saver. There are some really powerful refactoring tools and also the ability to create ActionScript and MXML code templates.

The plug-in is available in Flash Builder as a top level menu and also provides other integration points in the right click menu and other areas. Some cool features are: the ability to generate getter/setters for class properties, generate toString methods, change method signature, convert local variable to field (class property), extract method/interface/constant/local variable, override implement methods, and more!

SourceMate provides the ability to generate Ant build scripts and also generate and build ASDoc.

Flash Builder is great on its own but SourceMate adds some really great, time saving functionality. I’m still exploring it and have yet to really become a power user, there’s still a TON of stuff that I plan on rolling into my Flex development workflow.

You can get a free 30 day demo and the price is more than reasonable for the power that you get.

I highly recommend stopping by the Element River site, downloading the trial, checking out some of their screenshots and videos and giving SourceMate a try. Five stars!!!

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.

]]> http://seantheflexguy.com/blog/2009/11/01/the-decorator-design-pattern-and-open-closed-principle/feed/ 0 http://seantheflexguy.com/blog/2009/05/20/top-ten-flex-tools-and-resources/ http://seantheflexguy.com/blog/2009/05/20/top-ten-flex-tools-and-resources/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 15:02:46 +0000 seantheflexguy http://seantheflexguy.com/blog/?p=306 When developing Flex and/or AIR applications there are a handful of tools that really make the difference between a good project and a great project. They are all very valuable and provide stability and clarity for the RIA development process; or at least they have for me. From Unit Testing to SVN utilities to frameworks and libraries I’ve found the following ten items to be very useful and helpful. I’d even go so far as to say these are critical for quality Flex RIA development; but as Les says: “It’s just a matter of opinion.”

Cairngorm
Cairngorm is the lightweight micro-architecture for Rich Internet Applications built in Flex or AIR. A collaboration of recognized design patterns, Cairngorm exemplifies and encourages best-practices for RIA development advocated by Adobe Consulting, encourages best-practice leverage of the underlying Flex framework, while making it easier for medium to large teams of software engineers deliver medium to large scale, mission-critical Rich Internet Applications.

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/cairngorm/Cairngorm

Download: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/opensource/cairngorm/cairngorm2_2_1-bin.zip

Flex Unit
FlexUnit is a unit testing framework for Flex and ActionScript 3.0 applications and libraries. It mimics the functionality of JUnit, a Java unit testing framework, and comes with a graphical test runner.

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexunit/FlexUnit

Download: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/opensource/flexunit/flexunit0_9.zip

Subclipse
Subclipse is an Eclipse Team Provider plug-in providing support for Subversion within the Eclipse IDE. The software is released under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0 open source license.

http://subclipse.tigris.org/

Eclipse update site URL: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x

Eclipse
Eclipse is a multi-language software development platform comprising an IDE and a plug-in system to extend it. It is written primarily in Java and is used to develop applications in this language and, by means of the various plug-ins, in other languages as well – C, C++, COBOL, Python, Perl, PHP and more.

http://www.eclipse.org

Download: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

ASDoc
ASDoc is a command-line tool that you can use to create API language reference documentation as HTML pages from the classes in your Adobe® Flex® application. The Adobe Flex team uses the ASDoc tool to generate the Adobe Flex Language Reference.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=asdoc_1.html

Flex Ant Tasks
The Adobe® Flex® Ant tasks provide a convenient way to build your Flex projects using an industry-standard build management tool. If you are already using Ant projects to build Flex applications, you can use the Flex Ant tasks to replace your exec or java commands that invoke the mxmlc and compc compilers. If you are not yet using Ant to build your Flex applications, you can take advantage of these custom tasks to quickly and easily set up complex build processes for your Flex applications.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=anttasks_1.html

Installation: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=anttasks_2.html#224215

Degrafa
Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework open source licensed under MIT.

http://www.degrafa.org

Download: http://www.degrafa.org/code/

as3corelib
The corelib project is an ActionScript 3 Library that contains a number of classes and utilities for working with ActionScript 3. These include classes for MD5 and SHA 1 hashing, Image encoders, and JSON serialization as well as general String, Number and Date APIs.

http://code.google.com/p/as3corelib/

Download: http://as3corelib.googlecode.com/files/as3corelib-.92.1.zip

Flex SDK coding conventions and best practices
Coding standards for writing open-source Flex framework components in ActionScript 3. Adhering to these standards makes the source code look consistent, well-organized, and professional.

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Coding+Conventions

Flex Language Reference
The Flex 3.3 Language Reference provides syntax and usage information for every element in the ActionScript™ language. It documents all elements in Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe® AIR™ that are officially supported by Adobe.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/

Some items we’ve covered in the Java class so far are: SDK installation and command line compilation, data types, control flow, variables/operators, numbers, arrays, objects and classes, static classes and methods, method overloading, object construction, constructor overloading, OOP basics, packages, commenting, generating JavaDoc, inheritance, abstract classes, polymorphism, sub/superclasses, reflection, inner classes, graphics programming, event handling, Swing and Collections including Maps, Lists, Sets and the Comparator interface. We’re compiling all of our homework using the command line. It’s pretty cool. The class also demands a pretty rigorous reading schedule. The three-pronged-learning-approach is working well for me: lectures, reading, coding (homework and labs.) The ins and outs of the language are really sinking in.

A few immediate benefits to learning more about Java are: Flex and BlazeDS / LCDS integration, strengthen fundamental OOP understanding and comprehension and also gain knowledge of OOP concepts not available in Flex/AS3. Learning Java also provides the opportunity to get exposure to Swing (Flex’s distant relative). Also, since the Flex compiler and other aspects of the Flex SDK are written in Java this opens up the door to greater understanding of the Flex SDK and even bug contributions. Java makes extensive use of design patterns and there is a plethora of existing Java code to look at, use and learn from. (Cairngorm was born from J2EE design patterns.)

There are several differences that I noticed in Java. Some items available in Java and not in AS3: static classes, abstract classes, private constructors, constructor overloading, method overloading and Collections. Working with Arrays is a LOT different, working with numbers is different, working with Strings is different and String comparison is different. There are no Hashmaps and no hashcodes in ActionScript. No equals() method. Another difference is that you have to implement your own design patterns more often in Java. Not a bad thing, and good to know how to do, but Flex takes care of a lot of things behind the scenes: events, data binding etc. I noticed that when coding Java the developer is expected to implement interfaces more often than in Flex/AS3. This is pretty cool; it involves more work but provides more power.

It’s been a cool experience and I wanted to share some of these thoughts and observations. I think more developers come into the Flex world from Java vs. the other way around. For some reason Java sort of reminds me of AS2… I may try to post some Java source code soon if time permits…