Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralMay 16th, 2008 | 1 Comment
Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) has support for creating and using SQLite databases through the use of the SQLConnection class in the flash.data package. Using this package you can store a database on a user's hard drive and even name it with any extension you'd like (registering your app with that extension will let you double click on your "database" file and open the app with that as a parameter, pretty slick).
One feature with the database package often overlooked is its ability to create and use in-memory databases. Using in-memory databases allows for faster read and write to the database...
Posted by Jacob Wright in AIRApr 29th, 2008 | 18 Comments
I wrote about an Active Record implementation for the Adobe Integrated Runtime using it's SQLite database functionality. I put up all the code on Google Code under the name AIR Active Record. Please check it out, let me know of bugs or features, or better yet, submit fixes and add-ons. If you're interested in being an active developer on it let me know.
Update:
To use the ActiveRecord (sorry for the lack of documentation), you need to extend it with a class for each table you'll use. For example, if I wanted an employee table I would create an Employee class like this:
package
{
...
Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralApr 3rd, 2008 | 1 Comment
I have to admit, it took me awhile to understand why anyone would want to open source their software. I understood perfectly well why I would want to use it, but as a developer who makes money from writing software I assumed you don't make money writing open source software, thus, you starve. I understand now how it works and will explain simply for both developers and business why open source software makes sense.
Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3Mar 18th, 2008 | 7 Comments
A while back I read a couple of blog posts about the slowness of using uint and int to iterate through for-loops. I needed to do some testing for a little project today and found this is false.
When using the "i" variable in for(var i = 0; i < length; i++) as an input into mathematical operation, especially when doing fractions, Number is faster for obvious reasons. This was established in the posts of the previously mentioned blogs. But when simply iterating over an array which is a very common use-case for for-loops uint is faster. Here is my test setup:
var value:Object;
var arr:Array = new...
Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, FlexMar 15th, 2008 | 12 Comments
Flex 3 gives us a great new feature, custom metadata tags. Now, I know you could actually use custom metadata in Flex 2, but you would have to add "-keep-as3-metadata MyTag" to every single project that utilized these custom tags. In Flex 3, if you add "-keep-as3-metadata MyTag" to a library (using compc to compile a SWC or a Flex Builder Library project), then EVERY project that uses that SWC will automatically keep the "MyTag" metadata tags. This allows custom libraries that utilize these tags for development.
Would be cool to create a library to hook up listeners so you can create listeners...
Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralMar 14th, 2008 | 3 Comments
I don't think there is a better open-source blog engine on the market than WordPress, but why is it so painful to update it? You have to back up the database, download the files, copy over the config file, themes, uploads, and any other stuff you need to the new installation, and then rename the folders quickly so the new one fills the space of the old one.
Why can't we just get the files that have changed downloaded and the database updated by pressing a big blue "Update" button?
