The Flash Art of War

So I have been building a new Framework at Heavy. This framework is more designed oriented then the MCVC framework I was using before. The entire UI (Display) tier is built on XML similar to MXML. With that in mind I needed a way to quickly convert xml nodes into config objects. This was the next logical step from my original Config Class.

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As I move into more elaborate AS 3 development, I began looking for a way to templatize my config objects for each of my classes. This is my first attempt at an Abstract Config class.

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Last night I organized my first The New York Flash Meetup¹ . It went well and there were some good conversations about the editors people use, porting over AS 2 to AS3, Flash Frameworks, as well as how to set up good workflow. Here is a copy of last nights itinerary:

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1. The New York Flash Meetup meets once a month so if you are in the NYC area come on out. [↩]

On my quest to build a better mouse trap I was looking into using Textmate with the open source Flex SDK. I love FDT 3 but sometimes you just want a light weight editor that can quickly get you up and running, especially on small projects. Here is a good tutorial to help you get started.

Also don’t forget to check out this extra bundle for ActionScript Utilities. Lots of thanks to Wil Stuckey¹ for helping me set this stuff up today and reminding me that Textmate still rules.

1. Wil is a sick developer over here at Heavy. [↩]

I just went through a great tutorial that shows how to set up the free Flex 3 SDK with FDT. It took about 10 mins to run through and I am ashamed I waited this long to set it up. Looks really promising because I was getting sick of waiting for the Flash IDE to compile. My goal is to use the SDK to compile my main apps and use the IDE to create swf libraries to use with my External Runtime Library Utility. Pick up the tutorial here or the PDF here.

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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I was very excited to see that my interview with Kristen Fischer from freelanceswitch.com was posted earlier today. Take a look at it here. Hope you enjoy the read, freelanceswitch.com is a great website for freelancers and a great subscription to have in your rss reader.

Since taking my job with Heavy.com things have been crazy. I am working on organizing some really sick code to share from my new job. I have basically set up a fresh AS 3 Shared library from scratch and cleaned up a lot of my good old stand by utilities as well as some new JavaScript APIs and image manipulation tools.

In the mean time, check out the new home page of heavy.com. The dev team at heavy is really good and its nice to be around sick programers who know their stuff. They did an amazing job of updating the site and pushing out a stable release. Since I started my job at the end of their development cycle I was only able to work on the home page video player. Right now I am porting over all the old AS 2 code to AS 3 so I have my work cut out for me.