RobotLegs is an IoC framework that’s been rising on the Flex framework scene. It’s a pure AS3 microarchitecture so it can be used in non-Flex projects as well. One thing that I like about the framework is that it does a pretty good job of telling you what’s wrong when you’re building your app. For example it’ll let you know if you’ve missed adding a class to the context. In this presentation I’ll show you how to set up a Flex app from the ground up using RobotLegs. In addition I’ll show you how to set up Flex Unit with RobotLets so that you can write unit tests or do test driven development for your project. I’ve worked with several Flex frameworks and RobotLegs is one of my favorites so far. This will be more of a live coding session than a theoretical talk about IoC. In this session you’ll learn how to set up your package structure, create a context, create a central data model, map events to commands, create and communicate with services, set up your views and use mediators as backing classes that will contain the ActionScript for them. I’ll also share a technique that I’ve been using that splits the context up so there isn’t one giant class to manage.

More information about the July preso can be found here:

http://ria5280.org/calendar/event/2010/7/15/178056

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…

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!!

Here is a short passage from the article:

“In this article, you will learn how to manage assets so that your application’s dependencies will be well organized. I will also discuss widely accepted ActionScript 3.0, MXML, and CSS coding standards currently being practiced by the Flex development community. I’ll review ASDoc, a tool that you can use to create API language reference documentation as HTML from your application’s source code. In the application architecture section of this article I’ll show techniques that you can use to help define the blueprints for your application’s foundation. I will cover some of the application development frameworks that are available to Flex developers and discuss when it makes sense to use them and when it does not. Lastly, I will cover best practices for unit testing so that you can test your codebase and ensure the code will perform consistently.”

“The goal of this article is to help you gain a better understanding of the Strategy design pattern. The Strategy pattern is used to separate the areas of an application that differ from the areas of an application that remain the same. This design pattern sits on top of several fundamental OOP principals. For example the Strategy pattern uses the concept of programming to an interface rather than an implementation. Strategy also favors composition over inheritance. The reason you would use the Strategy pattern is to abstract an algorithm from a class and create a new class based on the algorithm. Using polymorphism the algorithms can be changed at runtime by the compositing class.”

Exploring the Strategy Design Pattern
November 3, 2008
http://www.insideria.com/2008/11/exploring-the-strategy-design.html

This was a great article to write and it solidified a lot of knowledge about OOP and Design Patterns. I may write another one on the Factory Method. Leave a comment if you have any interest.

In other news I’ll also have another Flex Best Practices article being published on the Adobe website soon.

I’ve also been researching Livecycle and BlazeDS a lot recently. I managed to get both set up and working on my laptop. There are a number of similarities however the default Livecycle setup runs JBoss and the default setup of Blaze runs Tomcat. So some system tweaks were needed here and there. In addition I also had an existing installation of Oracle that really hosed things up. The Oracle installer added some items to my laptops PATH variable which resulted in quite a bit of debugging. Next I installed MySQL. That was cool and I learned a lot. I’ve done the MySQL installation before however it’s been a while (4 years’ish). The next thing I did was locate a sample database from the web to play around with. I found a pretty large sample employees database on the web and installed it. Then I started trying to remember the various SQL statements needed to retrieve data, JOINs etc. While working on all of this I also found a way to expose my Blaze server to the open web, despite the dynamically assigned IP address from my ISP. That was really cool, but super slow. I was accessing the Blaze samples from my other computer across the web however it was too slow to deal with (not sure what the problem was there, more research is needed probably my upstream.) So the next steps are going to be to write some cool SQL statements to pull data from my sample database, then setup my Blaze application instance/context, write my Java classes (integrating my SQL), set up my remoting configurations and then finally I want to build a “dashboard” and pump the data into some Flex charts. I’m really busy with client work and articles right now so who knows when I’ll be able to finish but the whole experience was fun and I learned A TON.

I’ve also been working on a cool client Flex project and sneaking in time here and there for some music. Well gotta run for now, until next time… Happy Flexing!!

I’m currently working on another article in the Flex best practices series. I’ve done a TON of research for the next article so it should be really good. Keep an eye out in the Adobe Dev Center for that sometime in September or October.

It was really, really, really cool to have an article published in the Dev Center, something I have wanted to do since at least 2002. Thanks again to Hong and Adobe for the opportunity!!

Some screen shots from the Adobe website: