Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, JavascriptNov 28th, 2009 | 5 Comments
So there may not be an exorbitant amount of use-cases for displaying an image in HTML that was generated real-time in Flash, but I thought’s cool, so I’m sharing anyway. It makes the inner-geek in me smile.
Short background: I was looking into creating a Flash drawing app that consisted only of the canvas portion, with the rest of the UI in HTML. This is for many reasons including the size of Flex, the native OS components in the browser, speed, and hey, it forces separation of core app logic from the presentation logic, right? ;)
So I wanted a way to display thumbnails of the pages...
Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, PHPNov 16th, 2009 | 16 Comments
After building a couple of RESTful services using the Zend Framework, I decided to create a dead simple REST server that allowed me to skip all the features I didn't need as well as a tons of classes that came with Zend Framework MVC. There are still useful features to add (XML support for example), but overall I'm quite happy with what I've come up with.
My solution, RestServer, is a JSON REST server, so far. It should be trivial to add support for XML or other formats, but there would have to be assumptions on what your object would look like in XML (XML-RPC style, your own custom XML format,...
Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, CSS, FlexAug 31st, 2009 | 4 Comments
Question: What's 2.8KB, can style any DisplayObject on the stage, and enjoys long walks on the beach?
Answer: Flex styling pwned!
So it's leaked out on twitter that Ben Stucki, Ryan Campbell, Tyler Wright, and myself are working together on a new RIA component initiative. Taking a different approach than Open Flux, we are starting from scratch and building up fresh. We're bringing together what we've learned from Open Flux and Stealth with the goal to release finished features and stable builds. We hope to provide something that we all can use in production. We haven't announced the name yet, officially.
Ryan...
Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, ActionScript 3, Applications, CSSAug 26th, 2009 | 4 Comments
Flash is a great platform. You can build applications for the browser, the desktop, and... well, what else is there?
When building applications, especially those with a document-based model such as the Aviary apps, Odosketch, My Canvas, ZenStudio, the apps on acrobat.com, and many others, you need a file format for the document or project. Or some way to save it.
What Not To Do
You don't want to save each item into a table in the database. I know a guy...who had a dream...that his friend did this. This guy's friend in his dream had a table for each item that needed to be stored with foreign keys...
Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralAug 25th, 2009 | 3 Comments
Been thinking about component architecture. Ok, so it's a regular topic of discussion with Tyler. There's a lot that goes into it, but at a high-level there seems to be two trains of thought, at least for me, that I'm trying to decide between: building for the component creator, or building for the component user. I'd like to discuss these two and round it up with the pros and cons. Maybe I'll settle on one by that point.
Component Creator
The component creator wants legos. He wants the pieces he can build components with easily (when I say "he" I mean me). He is frustrated with extending, building,...
Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, FlashAug 24th, 2009 | 6 Comments
Earlier I posted about the Response Pattern. Today I wanted to show an ActionScript implementation and how it would be used.
The API I decided to go with for this pattern uses method chaining. This is one of those things where people love it or they despise it. I'm sorry if you are one of the latter. Method chaining is where an object returns a reference to itself as the result of its methods. This allows you to call many methods on the object in one line. jQuery uses this and it is used a lot in the Zend Framework. As example you might have a drawing API helper that does this:
shape.fill(0x660000).rect(0,...
