Automatic Casting Using XML

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, FlexDec 28th, 2007 | 1 Comment I am loving the E4X stuff in ActionScript 3. Once you get your mind wrapped around it and if you don't have to deal with namespaces it is very nice. Namespaces can be useful too, I just wish you could turn a namespace-agnostic-mode on and off. I just discovered a cool trick I thought I'd share with you. I found it when I was iterating through the properties of two objects to test if they were equal. The properties of one object were all Strings because it was parsed from a comma-delimited file. So, some Booleans or Numbers were strings of "true" or "10.5" while their counter-parts I was testing...

AIR Active Record

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, ActionScript 3, FlexDec 19th, 2007 | 17 Comments I've been working with AIR quite a bit since my side project is in AIR. I thought it would be pretty cool to create an active record implementation in AIR since I've got one on the server side. I have to use synchronous database connections for it so that everytime I access an object's related properties I don't have to use a callback, though it could be refactored to do that. Not my idea of fun though, and after an excellent presentation by Jason Williams, "Working with Persistent Data in AIR," where he showed how fast it was to retrieve data from an AIR database I figured it would be just fine. Currently...

ActionScript 3 Bindable Dynamic Objects

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, FlexJun 26th, 2007 | 23 Comments So I've been working heavily in Flex lately (and AIR). Been making my own components and building user interfaces for Cascade. For a project I'm working on at work it implements its own localization. It uses a method called getString('myString') to load a string up from the XML strings file. This was not good for interfaces with lots of strings in it. It required giving every label, every input, every button and id and then after the strings were loaded assigning them all. One of the MXML files I was looking at had over 50 strings to be set and the listener to the string loading ended up being...