Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralMar 13th, 2008 | 16 Comments
A question I’ve often gotten is “How do I roll back some changes I made in Subversion?” I’m the company expert in Subversion here at mediaRAIN (another one of my hats) so I thought I’d answer the question one more time.
Subversion is great as it allows you to track every change you’ve made and go back to a previous version if needed. Sometimes you only need to go back to an earlier revision temporarily (for example to tag the project at that point). But other times you (or that lousy co-worker who left on vacation yesterday!) have introduced bugs or committed...
Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralMar 3rd, 2008 | 17 Comments
I learned a little trick the other week and thought I’d share. Sometimes you might need to listen to a non-bubbling event “up the chain” somewhere, but of course, since it is not bubbling, that can be hard. The trick is that event events that don’t have bubbling still have the capture phase, so if you flip that capture flag to true in the event listener then you can now listen to any events dispatched by any child views whether they are bubbling or not.
Example:
// listen for some event (this one is even custom) that does not bubble
// make sure to set true on capture
stage.addEventListener(“customNonBubbling”,...
Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralMar 3rd, 2008 | 4 Comments
The Flex SDK is finally fully open-source. So I thought I’d have a little fun and implement my own Binding classes to be used when using the [Bindable] metadata tag in an ActionScript 3 project.
The first thing I did of course was to checkout the Flex SDK from subversion. They’ve got instructions on doing all that in their wiki. The wiki also has some great instructions for downloading and installing ANT and the other things you’ll need to build the SDK. Look further down on the previously linked to page in the section “Building and testing.”
Once I had the project...
Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, FlexFeb 7th, 2008 | 8 Comments
The first question you probably have after seeing the title of this post is “why would you make an alternative to Flex?” Or perhaps, “how could you even think of competing with Flex?” Honestly, we aren’t trying to compete. This will be open source. And alternatives are always nice to have. We could talk about how difficult it can be to extend the Flex components, how limited the styling is, or how Flex makes complicated things easy and easy things complicated, but the fact of the matter is we just thought building an alternative would be fun.
Now, that being said,...
Posted by Jacob Wright in FlexJan 26th, 2008 | 3 Comments
I’ve been thinking deeply about how applications are architected. Tyler and I put together a MVC framework which we’ve been reluctant to release because he’s not sure if it’s quite right or if it’s different enough from other frameworks, and because I don’t have time to put it up and document it. So we’ve been brainstorming on how it might be better.
I’ve decided that there are two main focuses when designing a Flex application, and it results in two different kinds of frameworks. There is Flex-focused applications and server-focused applications....
Posted by Jacob Wright in CSS, FlexJan 17th, 2008 | 8 Comments
I was reading a post about the Top 10 Flex Misconceptions and read in the 2nd section that "Flex also uses CSS for styling of components / applications."
I know since day one Adobe has listed CSS styling as a feature of Flex. But anyone who has used CSS to style a web page knows that Flex does not support CSS. It supports, well, SS.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Flex is missing the "Cascading" part of it. CSS is all about using a style sheet to describe the "presentation of the document" (World Wide Web Consortium CSS1). Because of the limited amount of the CSS standard that Flex supports,...
