aron / philipp development blog » Flex

AsWing – ActionScript UI component framework

Aron — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:26:34 +0000

Keith Peters was right, when he said, that Flash has a lack of UI component frameworks. The Flex components has a quasi monopoly on that. Besides his minimal components there is another alternative: AsWing.

Last year Neue Digitale / Razorfish gave me the chance to dive into AsWing. The task was to build a form manager that can not only run in Flex projects but also in straight AS3 projects where no flex runtime is available.

© aron for aron / philipp development blog, 2010. | Permalink
Post tags: ActionScript, AS3, AsWing, Flash, Flex, UI components

XML to VO – as easy as apple pie!? (demo included)

Aron — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:00:20 +0000

I’m currently working with SOAP web services. While making adjustments to the classes of the wsdl Flex Builder class generator I discovered, that there is an easy way to decode / parse XML to VOs (value objects). The XMLDecoder inside the rpc package does the trick. I’m still confused why there are not more resources on the web regarding this topic but If you want to digg deeper, I strongly recommend reading these blog posts by Dominic De Lorenzo:

Flex 3, XML Schemas & automatic mapping of AS classes to XSD element definitions (Part 1)
Flex 3, XML Schemas & automatic mapping of AS classes to XSD element definitions (Part 2)

I’m not an XML pro and some things in his example I’m still not getting (namespaces in XML, yes well…). Also, his example is in Flex and I just wanted to have a basic example on how this could be useful for my work.

© aron for aron / philipp development blog, 2009. | Permalink
Post tags: ActionScript, Flex, soap, value object, vo, wsdl, XML, XMLDecoder, XMLSchema

Improving your code with FlexPMD

Phil — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:44:24 +0000

Last week Adobe released a nice tool called FlexPMD – it can help you and your development team to improve the quality of the code you generate by looking for common bad practices like i.e. unused or inefficient code.

To better understand how FlexPMD works and what it exactly does, have a look at “About FlexPMD”.

You can use default or custom rulesets to control what FlexPMD is looking for. With the Custom Ruleset Creator you can – guess what – create your own rulesets and check your code against these rules.

There are three ways to use FlexPMD with your projects:

from the command line
from Ant
from Maven

© Phil for aron / philipp development blog, 2009. | Permalink
Post tags: ActionScript, Ant, code, Flex, FlexPMD, quality control

Flex DataGrid revisited

Phil — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:15:31 +0000

Hi there … some weeks ago I blogged about my struggles with Flex and its built-in DataGrid. After some time of getting to know “my Grid”, I decided to refactor the previous example.

Flex DataGrid – impressions of a Flex noob

Phil — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:50:15 +0000

Hiho. Been busy these last couple of weeks … For me it’s the first time looking deeper into this whole Flex stuff. And Aron is getting his hand dirty with iPhone development and Google Web Toolkit (GWT). But as the title already says, this post is all about Flex.

Right now, I’m building some Flex-modules that are heavily data-driven – that’s basically why I chose Flex in the first place. After trying to build my own datagrids and excel-like tables in Flash/AS3 I quickly decided to turn to Flex and use the built-in components to get everything working.

So …. after getting to know Flex a little better, I can say one thing for sure: I don’t really like it :)
You got components for almost everything, but if your requirements differ just a bit from the features the flex-components offer, you are screwed. and especially the DataGrid – it’s very easy to get some rows out of your database and display them in the grid, but don’t event try to use complex data … then everything crashes and you have to write dozens ans dozens of ItemRenderers and work-arounds to display the data in the DataGrid.
yadda yadda yadda … I’m still working my butt off to get everything as I want it to be – but I thought I’ll share my thoughts and especially my “tricks” with you.

AIR Flex App: Email Address Organizer

Aron — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:14:52 +0000

Goal:

Create a mailing list.

How to:

Install app
Create a project
Import some email addresses as csv file
Sort email addresses
Export csv file
Done

Background:

I never had a mailing list inside my email app. I’m using Thunderbird for several years now, but i was always too lazy to create a proper mailing list. I know that sounds funny, but every time i want to send some birthday invitations I pick every email address one-by-one from the global address book (thats where Thunderbird puts all the addresses in, i ever wrote an email to or received an email from). Ridiculous!

So if you ever have a lot of time to order all your email addresses, this tool might help you.