The Flash Art of War

While on the topic of good coding practices I forgot to post a link to this great artical on recognizing a good programer. I have used this as a reference when interviewing new Flash Developers where I work.

So for the better half of my Friday I did research on how to best implement a service controller¹ for the new AS 3 Heavy Video Player I am building. Normally I would just slap together a few singleton utility classes and be on my way but, after having a conversations with Myles² about a blog post he read that said using singletons were bad, I started thinking about if I was going down the wrong path.

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1. To handle services like saving favorites, logging in, alert windows, and other core functions [↩]
2. we use to work together at MLB.com but now he is over at RGA [↩]

Awhile ago I read this article about best practices for creating singletons in AS 3 on gskinner’s blog. I thought I would share the template that I use for creating my utility classes.

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The controller is the glue that holds your application together. It facilitates communication between views and Models as well as Models to other Models. This controller also over comes one of AS 2.0 fatal flaws; the event system.

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So you learned how to handle a model’s name, as well as passing in a config object and bind the model to the controller here. Now we will move on to the real fun like loading xml data into the model and understanding its’ timers as well as the event system.

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The core part of my MCVC system is the BaseModel class. In this system it represents a core data class with no visual representation. All data classes are extended from this class and are responsible for loading xml data, parsing that data, managing the data/state of the supporting classes (such as Views and Components) and handling the receive/sending of events through the controller binding. Here is how it works. ** Warning but this post is long and is a continuation from this post on MCVC. **

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For years I avoided the event system in AS 2. It was horrible and it couldn’t keep it’s scope. Now that I am working in AS 3 I am trying my hardest to like the new event system and event class. Unfortunately it is missing one thing I always needed it to do, pass off data or an object along with the event. Here is how I get around it.

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While building the NapkinNotebook site I needed a flexible View Class that all of the animated objects on the stage could be extended from. This is the class I decided to go with.

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I am sure by now you know about the NapkinNotebook website I did for Euro RSCG but what I haven’t had a chance to show you yet is some of the code behind how it works.

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I just built a utility that will allow you to dynamically load in a swf with library assets and pull them out to use them anywhere in your application. This is the evolution of this code example from Adobe. Here is what you need to know to get it up and running quickly:

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