O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Wikipedia defines Lazy Loading as "a design pattern commonly used in computer programming to defer initialization of an object until the point at which it is needed." Typically, we do this to make an RIA application more responsive–since we're not...

A large part of any ActionScript project is code dedicated to testing and debugging. These parts of your application may be needed while in development, but usually not needed within a production environment. You might think that making a release build will take care of everything. Really, this only takes out the internal debugger code but not any of the traces or code that you might of defined while creating your project. The only way to strip this code out of your code base is with conditional compiling.

In a previous article I outlined why I needed to inject JavaScript into a page from ActionScript, now I'd like to show the implementation. Essentially I created a new class called JSInjector. Within JSInjector I created a static function...

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.

Recently, I decided to get my hands dirty with the latest build of Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4. The new IDE has a lot of really exciting new features that will save developers a lot of time. The features that excite me the most are the new Spark components and skinning capabilities in the new SDK. Towards the beginning of the year I had read through the first few drafts of the new Spark component architecture, the style changes and how easy it is to skin components. Lots of things have changed since then, so I decided to refresh my memory and build a simple component to test my knowledge. Behold the SortableList component.

In some of my recent articles I detailed the architecture and some implementation of a video player swapper - that is a video player that can play different kinds of videos, assuming that the videos required specific unique players. After...

This video excerpt is from Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend Course 2. In Course 2 of this unique DVD training series, you'll learn intermediate to advanced ActionScript 3.0 programming concepts. World-renowned ActionScript guru and educator Colin Moock presents...

We're going to keep this post lean and mean, and get down to business with 10 Tips that will keep your Flex applications fast, lean, and responsive. The tips are focused around three best practices rules. Rule # 1: Clean up after yourself -- In general, it is good practice to maintain clean code. Not only in the sense of having properly formatted and readable code, but also code that leaves nothing behind... no memory leaks, no cpu hogs, nothing but a clean object that can be reclaimed by the GC.

In my previous article I detailed the architecture for a video player that would switch between multiple players, using composition to support the same interface across each layer of the architecture. The architecture worked out really well, but when I...

This excerpt is from Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend Course 2. In Course 2 of this unique DVD training series, you'll learn intermediate to advanced ActionScript 3.0 programming concepts. World-renowned ActionScript guru and educator Colin Moock presents this intimate...

In this excerpt from Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, learn how to place visual content on screen, then rearrange, remove, and manage it with code. Guest-star appearance by Adobe engineer Jim Corbett, the creator of ActionScript's display API.

In this video excerpt from Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, learn how to create visual content in ActionScript. Guest-star appearance by Adobe engineer Jim Corbett, the creator of ActionScript's display API.

Welcome back to the series and the concluding article of the exciting facebook series. So far we worked hard to implement features like the front end, administration, loading of YouTube videos etc. In the last article the application came finally to life. We implemented a database that contains 14 levels for the game.

In this video excerpt from Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, learn to refer to a single object from multiple parts of a program, then study the principles of memory management in ActionScript. Remember, values are not socks!

Advance 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 - 3 Design Patterns Built Into AS 3.

Welcome back to our exciting series. In the last article, we discussed about the administrative part of the application, where we implemented a background activity to allow every application user to upload their own videos and add mistakes. This time we will work on the front end that will be visible to everyone by default and where the main game play will take place. Before we start with the development, there are important things that need to be considered. First of all, there will be 14 levels to play, 14 levels means 14 video clips, 14 movie snippets.

In one of my previous articles I spoke about the need for client-side error logging. In that article I elaborate a bit on why you need to. Here I explain one way to go about doing it. The core logic...

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.

Last time we talked about how to work with YouTube videos and how to implement those into our app. We worked hard to implement typical features that can be found on most video sites like play, pause, seek etc. As we already know, there is one external library used in our application that allows us to load videos into the swf and manipulate the video using ActionScript 3.0. Now it’s time to actually work on the admin part of the app and the features that allow us and all our application users (players) to add their own videos along with mistakes. This way the application will much more extensible. There are lots of Facebook users who are movie fans and we will give them the ability to contribute.