O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - Using IntelliJ Idea 9 For Flash...

Hamcrest? No, it isn't a fancy sandwich topping. Hamcrest is a framework for creating matchers, allowing matching rules to be defined declaratively (from Wikipedia). Hamcrest has been used by many popular unit testing frameworks including JUnit and FlexUnit 4. Hamcrest-AS3...

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. Each AFT is designed to be quickly digested, usually only taking a few minutes to get up and running, and contains valuable information you can directly apply to your next Flash campaign. In this AFT I will go over - Photoshop for Developers.

This article is not about werewolves or other shape-shifting creatures. Polymorphism is an object-oriented concept. Perhaps THE object-oriented concept. For a language to truly support object-oriented paradigms, it must provide developers with the ability to implement polymorphic objects. Luckily for us, Actionscript 3 meets this criteria. This article is an introduction to polymorphism and how you can utilize the concept to build stronger applications, promote code reuse, and more easily unit test your code.

A look at how to create an AIR Badge page with Aptana studio.

Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of Control (IoC) are design patterns that have been receiving a lot of attention recently in the ActionScript 3 framework community. These patterns provide a solid basis for creating loosely coupled, testable code. This article...

If you've been following the news in the web and/or RIA industry at all lately you've undoubtedly come across two little letters, U and X. UX of course, is the abbreviation for the big trend in application development right now known as User Experience. You've worked hard to become a great developer. You've learned the best practices to write bulletproof code, you've even mastered a crazy framework. Now it's time to go to the next level, you need to create an exceptional experience that matches your solid code.

In the spirit of tonight's first NFL game of the season, I decided to put together an example that integrates feeds from NFL.com and brings it directly to your desktop. This is a basic example that demonstrates how to use Flash Builder's data wizards to consume data from a public rss feed as a HTTPService.

It's imperative to identify what your requirements are and the number of resources that you'll need to address them. You must determine what your team needs to accomplish before you begin to assemble it, otherwise you risk redundancy, inefficiency, and slowed or stalled projects. It sounds elementary, but this step can save you a lot of headaches later on.

Designer-developer workflow (D-D workflow) in conjunction with Rich Internet Applications (RIA) has become one of the most talked about buzzword in the Flash community in the last few years. It created a lot of debate and uncertainty on how designers and developers were going to work together. Now that Adobe Catalyst is public (since the release at the Adobe Max conference last year), and that we have had a chance to play around with the tool, I believe it’s time to open a discussion on how the direction the D-D workflow should be heading based on my experience. In this article I will talk about how Flash Catalyst (FC) should be used to allow designers and developers to work together.

With the release of Flex 4, misconceptions abound regarding Flex, and there has been a general reluctance to build Flex development teams internally. These are that Flex resources are scarce, and that teams need years of experience, must be large, expensive, and comprised of all-stars. However, I've found that with a few exceptions, the opposite is generally true and that nearly any organization can afford to build an effective team. This series of articles intends to debunk mistaken notions and help organizations realize the power and accessibility of this skill set.

In this video excerpt from Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, enjoy a gentle introduction to the fundamentals of object-oriented programming, including classes, objects, methods, and variables.

In previous articles, we finished writing most of the code of the Pac-Man game. In article 3, we implemented a simple algorithm for the ghosts to catch the Pac-Man. The ghosts randomly decides in which direction they move. They do not chase the Pac-Man even they are very close to him. This makes the game less challenging. In fact, the behavior of the ghosts are the most tricky part of the game. According to Iwatani, the author of the original arcade game, he had designed each ghost with its own distinct personality in order to keep the game from becoming too difficult or boring to play. ( More info) However, there is generally no conclusion on what behavior of the ghosts are good for the players.

In the last article, we developed a preliminary version of the Pac-Man game. Four ghosts are randomly roaming the maze and a Pac-Man character can be controlled by a player. Now, we write some more code for the interaction between ghosts and the Pac-Man:

1. Pac-Man eats a ghost after he gobbles a magic dot.
2. A ghost eats the Pac-Man when it touches him.

We are now ready to create the ghosts in our game. The four ghosts, namely Blinky(red), Pinky(pink), Inky(cyan) and Clyde(orange), are trapped inside a cage when a game starts. After some time, they get out of the cage one by one and start roaming the maze. Their goal is to catch the Pac-Man. The Pac-Man dies if he is touched by one of the ghosts. If the Pac-Man swallows a magic dot, he has the power to eat ghosts for a while. During this time, the ghosts turn hollow and move more slowly.

In last article, we designed a data model and drew a maze with dots spread into the maze. Now we are ready to create the Pac-Man character. The Pac-Man character is controlled by the game player to move around the maze. While he is moving, he keeps gobbling dots along the path. To implement the Pac-Man character, we divide the coding into a few tasks so that we can create it bit by bit:

When I was young I was fascinated by arcade games. One of my favorites was the Pac-Man game.  Recently, when I was learning the JavaFX language, I decided to write the game in JavaFX.  Based on my experience in other programming languages, I assumed there would be some amount of work in building a game such as Pac-Man, giving me a good feel for RIA development in JavaFX.

Note: This is excerpted from Chapter 3 of the Rough Cuts version of Enterprise Development with Flex. This book is still in progress, and you can get access to it now. Get the Enterprise Development with Flex Rough Cut Rough...

Using jQuery and jQuery UI to create a 'pick a winner' style application for sports tournaments.

Note: This is excerpted from Chapter 3 of the Rough Cuts version of Enterprise Development with Flex. This book is still in progress, and you can get access to it now. Get the Enterprise Development with Flex Rough Cut Rough...