Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Object Oriented ProgrammingMar 10th, 2010 | 3 Comments
Been loving 360 Flex this year! Tyler and I finally finished our presentation, and so I had some time to write a post I've been meaning to.
One of the issues one comes across in building performant applications in Flash is object creation and garbage collection. Object pooling helps overcome this. Object pooling is keeping old objects around and reusing them instead of throwing them away and always creating new fresh objects.
Creating objects in Flash isn't bad. It's when you create hundreds or thousands of throw-away objects very quickly that this becomes a problem.
Used Pooling in Observe
For...
Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, ReflexFeb 17th, 2010 | 4 Comments
Monday I wrote about how I would use the observer pattern to alter the functionality of getters/setters and respond to changes without using Flash's events. Tyler and I brainstormed more about the solution and as I knew would happen we came up with a better implementation.
Changes
One thing I didn't like about my initial go at it, is that you had to create a class with three methods, and usually you only used one of them. So methods were being called that didn't need to be for the sake of it. We decided to add functions on an as-needed basis. I named the different types checks, hooks, and observers.
Check,...
Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, ReflexFeb 8th, 2010 | 6 Comments
I've been trying to figure out the best way to include a styling framework with Reflex as needed, without requiring APIs and including extra classes in the core. Pay-as-you-go. The solution that I finally came up with turns out to be great for not only styling, but effects/transitions and data-binding too. I'll start with data-binding to try and describe the benefit.
Flex Data-binding
In Flex we have data-binding. Data-binding is cool. Allows us to do stuff a lot easier. We use it in almost everything we write in Flex.
Unfortunately, data-binding is based on the event dispatching system in Flex....
Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralJan 26th, 2010 | 2 Comments
It's been busy lately. I haven't written for awhile because I've been preparing to take a new job and move to Colorado.
I've taken a job with Filtrbox who was just acquired by Jive Software. They're the guys who made the Open Fire XMPP server, but their main product now is enterprise community software that allows large corporations to use Facebook, Twitter, and other social paradigms to communicate. Better than a million emails, that's for sure. I'm very excited to be working with them. I'll be working on the same stuff I was with Filtrbox, listening in on public social mediums such as Twitter...
