O’Reilly: Inside RIA

The ActionScript compiler generates SWFs (Flash applications) by compiling source code for classes that you write and linking in classes from SWCs (libraries) that are referenced by your code. Classes that are not referenced are not included in the SWFI...

Type casting and type checking have always been central to any computer programming language, especially in Object Oriented languages like Actionscript. In fact, knowing what type of object you are receiving as a parameter or the ability to "transform" your...

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 - As3 Design Patterns On The iPhone....

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 - Flash TDD Project Template. Those of...

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 - URI Manager Utility. In the past I have talked about using RegEx to create a utility for replacing tokens in a string. My uri manager utility follows the same concept but helps you organize all of your URIs in a external file. Not only that but when you request them when, you can customize their values on the fly. Whether you are keeping track of 1 or 100+ URIs this simple utility will help make your life way easier.

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 - 5 Tips for Documenting Code. Documenting code is not high on many people's lists of things todo. Most of the time it is boring, repetitive, and time consuming. If you want to get better at documenting your own code then this is the post for you. I have 5 simple rules to follow while coding to make the process easier.

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 - Dynamically Creating Classes From XML.

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.

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...

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 - describeType.

F*CSS - CSS support for AS3 F*CSS is a new library I have been working on to help fill in the gaps in AS 3's CSS support. This began in my Flash Camo Framework's PropertySheet system and is now evolving...

In my previous entry I discussed including and implementing the Calendar component in a new project. In this next entry I'm going to explore the Calendar class. The basic idea for the Calendar class is to assemble a collection of...

A homework assignment I was recently given for a Java programming class involved a competition to see who could create the most optimized implementation of an interface which was provided by the instructor. It was a challenging and very fun assignment that I think the whole class enjoyed. I didn’t win the competition but still came out a winner because of my heightened interest in application optimization and performance tuning that I gained.

I previously blogged about the importance of coding standards, and offered my opinions on what beautiful code looks like. Regardless of whether you accept my code formatting conventions for yourself or not, there is an excellent Eclipse plug-in that can...

Almost a year ago the YouTube APIs and Tools team released the YouTube Player API. The SWF that exposed the player functionality was and still is written in ActionScript 2. To make this easier to use in ActionScript 3, there...

KitchenSync is an up-and-coming ActionScript 3.0 library for sequencing animations and other time-based actions. The project is focused on giving developers a smarter way to handle animation or other time-based, rather than frame-based, functionality with code. The whole project is geared towards using standard OO practices to make time-based synchronization easier on developers. Creator Mims Wright recently announced a Kitchen Sync demo contest which has generated some buzz around my office and got me interested in the project. The winners will have their entries demoed at the upcoming <head> conference. I recently caught up with Mims and had the opportunity to ask him some questions about the project. If you haven't heard of Mims before, he's a great developer who co-authored the Actionscript 3.0 Bible and has done a lot of great Flash work in his career. Mim's is a really friendly guy and agreed to an interview about KitchenSync.