bustardcelly » Flash

Introducing as3flobile components

todd anderson — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:12:41 +0000

The library is available on github at bustardcelly/as3flobile. You can read more detailed information on the wiki. You can also look at the online docs. Continue reading if you enjoy rambling explanations.

As per usual, i had started a personal project that focused on refining parts of an old application and ended up creating a new library. This time, that application was going to get a face lift as i tried to port some code over to AS3-only views with the goal of targeting Android devices. What seemed like a little side project turned into a fun, can’t-stop-thinking-about suite of custom ActionScript 3 components.

You can view the components here: http://www.custardbelly.com/android/froyo/as3flobile/. If you have a Flash-enabled device, please check them out and let me know how they run. I have only really tested on my Nexus 1.

A full list of the current components is available on the project’s wiki in github. The main intent of creating these controls was to start thinking about user gesture as recognition and navigation within a control. My first task was to forget about scrollbars. They have essentially become useless on touch-devices in the context of navigating through content of a defined area. Though as3flobile does provide scrollbars in a sense (they are called Sliders) they are meant for selecting a value within a range, not as a handrail to hold onto to traverse items in a list. As a visual clue, the scrollbar still makes sense. As a user-input model, it is slowly not.

In any event, scrolling was the first gesture tackled. So I mainly started out making a ScrollViewport and then went crazy making all these other controls i know i would need if i ever got back to the original task at hand I could talk more in depth on how i tackled scrolling and how i kept the API open for you to create your own scrolling contexts and plug them in in later posts if you’d like.

There is some tap recognition, such as when selecting a list item or a RadioButton, but most of the focus is on swipe gesture for scrolling. I would like to start diving into other gestures (ie. zoom) which would probably make me rethink the architecture of a custom component for a touch-device, not only in its gesture recognition but also how you interact to access information. For instance, does a drop down really make any sense any more? (though there is a DropDown in as3flobile) I don’t know if i am the only one, but it really feels antiquated to me. I wonder if there will come a time when we are old and we look at old pictures of the online forms we used to fill out with there funny old clunky controls… how much time was wasted.

You keep talking, but can you skin them?

Yes, you can skin them. There really isn’t a skinning architecture in as3flobile per se. Any control that is a subclass of AS3FlobileComponent (which all the controls in the library currently are) can accept an ISkin and can maintain a state related to or rather accessible by an ISkin. Furthermore, the assignment, targeting and update to the skins is handled within AS3FlobileComponent with protected hook-ins you can override if seen fit.

However, if you look at the default skins within as3flobile, in com.custardbelly.as3flobile.skins.*, you’ll see that the ISkin implementations actually reference their target controls directly to access the graphic displays needed for custom skinning. I figured there was no reason to add extra overhead by creating interfaces for a control strictly for skinning purposes. If you create a custom skin for a control, it is assumed you know what the control needs to look like; so access it directly. Though the target property of ISkin is ISkinnable (which AS3FlobileComponent implements), the target is most times cast to the specific control that is being skinned. If people are really interested in these components and curious as to how to skin them, i can definitely fire up some more posts on that.

In any event, i hope you check out the as3flobile project in github and/or get down to business as Gary always seems to do. If you do check out the as3flobile project, suggestions, comments and questions are always appreciated. I am sure there are some bugs and some aspects of the controls that i just didn’t think of that may be needed.

Announcing as3couchdb Library

todd anderson — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:15:23 +0000

The library is available on github at bustardcelly/as3couchdb. You can read more detailed information on the wiki. Continue reading to hear me blab on and on.

When the new year came and i had finally got in my last chapter for Flex 4 Cookbook, it was time to return to my list of things to learn. I started looking into Capuccino and Closure and bought a book on Python. Somewhere along the way i just clicked on some tweet about 5 emerging trends that i must know about. Usually i find these lists are a grain-of-salt bandwagon of buzzery – maybe some truth but can’t cut through the true meaning of why this person is writing about them. But one did stick – NoSQL. I looked into the different implementations and right away i took a fancy to CouchDB. I don’t know why. It seemed quite simple. Working with a database using REST calls. Sounds good. And i could write my own map-reduce views in Javascript. Sign me up.

What also was a big draw to me was the concept of document revisions in CouchDB. I had worked on a couple projects that required online/offline synchronization and it was quite a pain to keep track of last modified entries and cleanup of deleted entries in a SQL database. The revisioning system for documents (entries) is built into CouchDB and what is more is that you are not locked into a rigid data structure and ensure your table relations are scalable. That’s not to say that building relational databases isn’t a fine art. It is. And there are many smarter people than me that get paid more money that have that craft. I don’t. The concept of revisions is familiar to me and i am greatly intrigued by the concept of NoSQL.

Anyway, i started digging into CouchDB and figured the one way for me to see the whole picture was to hook up a client side end to make these requests. See if what i was reading about was something i could use as a different approach to online/offline synchronization in my applications. What came out was a whole library for working with databases and documents of a CouchDB instance – a library which is now available on github at http://github.com/bustardcelly/as3couchdb.

Took me long enough to get talking about the as3couchdb library mentioned in the title, didn’t it? Well, you can read more long-winded explanations about the make-up of the library from the wiki on github, and browse some examples that use the library (currently all Flex examples, but AS3 examples are coming soon).

If you are still around, i can give a brief synopsis of the project:

When i set out on creating the as3couchdb library, i knew i wanted to follow a similar approach to Data Access Objects. I wanted to make all my requests through the object i was working with and have an intermediate layer that communicate with the service and updated the object accordingly. To achieve this, i went about creating a base model class that contains a model entity. The model entity is really only involved in parsing custom metadata and resolving the information to properties held on the base model. Extending the base model are the two core models of CouchDB that you interact with: the Database and the Document.

So the Database and Document models can be though of as the Business Objects and expose methods that related to CRUD operations. Even though CouchDB has a REST API, i chose using simple CRUD method signitures on the models as they seem easier to read and understand. From these methods, the models interact with a service mediator (similar to Data Access Object), which knows how to communicate with the service proxy and has action handlers that know how to modify the model once a successful result is received. To put it in code terms:

I wanted to have the ease of creating and storing a document as such

var contact:ContactDocument = new ContactDocument(); contact.firstName = "Todd"; contact.lastName = "Anderson"; contact.addEventListener(CouchActionType.CREATE, handleContactCreate); contact.create();

And the ease to simply read in for modification as such:

var contact:ContactDocument = new ContactDocument(); contact.addEventListener(CoachActionType.READ, handleContactRead); contact.read( $uid );

In order to make this all work and auto-wire the models with a service mediator, custom annotations were needed. This is where the model entity mentioned earlier comes into play. When extending the core models (as ContactDocument does in the previous examples) you add custom metadata that relates to the CouchDB instance you intend to work with and the fully qualified classnames of the target service mediator and request object.

Now the request object is a different story and was brought into the picture due to the lack of HTTP method types available for the web version of Flash Player. As such, there are a couple different request object types available in as3couchdb: straight-up devil-may-care requests using URLRequest (mainly for AIR or you will get RTEs), one that uses External Interface, and one that uses as3httpclientlib. The as3httpclientlib allows you to make PUT and DELETE requests using a Socket and is the best way to interact with a RESTful service when limited to the Flash web player (imho).

So that is a brief rundown of the model and business layer implementation i strove for when creating as3couchdb. As i mentioned way back in upward-page-scroll land, the original drive to make as3couchdb was to see if i could ease up the pain of developing an application that uses online/offline synchronization. That is in the works and maybe this blog will become a little more active as I dive into that task.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading all this. Wow. You are a trooper. Tell your boss i said it is okay and you can bill that time.

Link-link time!
CouchDB – http://couchdb.apache.org/
CouchDB: The Definitive Guide – http://books.couchdb.org/relax/
CouchDB: Wiki – http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/FrontPage
Planet CouchDB – http://planet.couchdb.org/
MongoDB, CouchDB and MySQL Compare Grid – http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/MongoDB,+CouchDB,+MySQL+Compare+Grid
as3httpclientlib – http://github.com/gabriel/as3httpclient

More information about the custom metadata, and the inner workings of as3couchdb can be found on the wiki for the project in github.

Flex 4 Cookbook Coming Soon!

todd anderson — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:27:55 +0000

Following the announcement of the Flex 4 SDK release, i thought i would mention a little something about a publication i have had the pleasure to be apart of (again! Big ups to Josh). The Flex 4 Cookbook from O’Reilly Media is expected to be dropped on May 15th 2010 and you can pre-order yours (and your loved one’s) today.

With the paradigm shifts in architecture from Flex 3 to Flex 4, the Flex 4 Cookbook is hardly an ‘updated’ version of the last. I had the pleasure i’ve diving deeper into the new SDK along side some extremely talented folks. Josh and I snagged Garth Braithwaite (of InsideRIA and Flash Community fame) and ~~forced~~ asked him to contribute his knowledge and expertise and we also snatched up David Tucker, Rich Tretola and Marco Casario of the Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook and dedicated a few chapters to Adobe AIR 2.0.

What could come of such a stellar line-up? More pages of writing than can be published that has been gratefully edited down to coherent sentences by the O’Reilly publishing team. And maybe a few laughs.

This is a huge step in the Flex 4 SDK and, in my opinion, a much needed step and the correct vision of the future of development for the Flash Platform. The Flex 4 engineers did an amazing job and i highly recommend downloading the SDK and playing around. The separation of responsibilities within the new Spark component architecture is a huge boost in my workflow and a stellar achievement.

Flash On Tap, Boston… I’ll Be There

todd anderson — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:29:54 +0000

… not that you’d actually be going to see this handsome fellow. That’s the look i give when they run out of Stone Ruination IPA.

Aah. When springtime in Boston hits, the weather is still cold for a couple months and the beer is flowing again. Actually, the beer flows all the time and the weather is unpredictable. Nonetheless, you know you are in for a good time, and i am looking forward to the Flash On Tap debut in my home town.

The beer sponsor list is amazing. Most beers you won’t be able to find on tap in our fair city, let alone the lot of them all in one place – aside from *possibly* my neighborhood haunts in Brookline (hit em up when you are out here). Stone, Smuttynose, Haverhill, Boulder.. the list goes on. In that order for me at least. I am excited about Haverhill, because even though it is a local brew (you gotta try, their LeatherLips it is awesome) some i have not tried because they are just not out here in my brick-filled neck of the woods.

Oh yeah… And then there’s gonna be some people rambling on about what-nots and crap. If you ain’t pourin’, i’m snorin’. That’s what i say. In all seriousness, the line up is insane. The beer is just icing on a knowledge cake waiting to cook.

See my sad face and full belly as i drink all the Ruination.

Flash On Tap
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Dependency Injection and IoC at BDP

todd anderson — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:17:20 +0000

Last week I was fortunate enough to be asked by Doug and Sam who run the BDP (Boston Design Patterns meet-up… NOT Boogie Down Productions) to present on Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control (DI and IoC for those who are down with street acronyms).

We had a nice turnout and a lively discussion that kept interupting my precious slides. I gave a quick run down of the Dependency Inversion principal and some examples for Factory and Template Method with segued into Dependency Injection and IoC. From there we dove into examples of frameworks out there that target the Flash Platform. Along the way we had some hefty discussion around the benefits and downsides with everyone chiming in. Tim Walling also brought up how he addresses DI using MXML and modules which was very intriguing.

As far as runtime IoC frameworks out there targeting the Flash Platform, we discussed Spring ActionScript (nee Prana) and Parsley. I’ve been using Spring ActionScript/Prana for some time and swear by it. But i also did take a second look at Parsley just to refresh my memory and I have to say there are some things that i find very promising, though at times it seems there might be too much to it. So many things i would not use… but the ability to configure custom namespaces looks like an amazing feature.

As far as compile time IoC, we touched on Swiz and the EventMap of Mate. Both have their upsides and Swiz has definitely caught my interest (…may have to find a personal project for me to get into it more) but all in all, I have a tendency to favor external configurations. (For those worried about having to do the static variable array list of classes hack because of that, there is an example in the download zip at the end of this post.)

In any event, it was a good, lively discussion with some smart people and some great beer (thanks again Doug!). It’s no wonder that getting to the meetings more often is top on my resolution list for this year. If you are in the Boston area, think about putting it on your list too.

Download the slides and examples here. We’ll get them up on at the BMP site too.

Flex Ant Tasks and FlexFileSet error

todd anderson — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 02:14:42 +0000

*This is more of a post-reminder or a google-search aha than a soliloquy on the joys of FlexTasks and how to use them. If you want to know more about flextasks, visit here, or Ryan Taylor’s blog for some good tips, or pick up this wonderful book… the holidays are coming.

I have had the fortunate opportunity to work with Andy Zupko on a project here at Infrared5. We have our good days and our bad days – as most projects go – and hopefully we’ll be able to showcase our efforts at some time. Recently i started whipping the project into shape to handle modules, rsls and loaded styles to minimize the download time and highten user experience. Why does it always come down to the last few days to get this up and running? I don’t know. Maybe we’re so gung-ho to get things finished for an iteration and to show a client that deployment structure falls a little to the wayside. In any event Andy, and in some part me i suppose, structured the project to have minimal impact when it came time to have a deployment routine and manage runtime styles and rsls. Enough horn-tooting! What am i talking about?

Well, when it came time to set up the ant tasks that will take over the deployment and distribution of the application i was hitting a wall in compiling against an rsl. More to the point, i was getting this error:

BUILD FAILED : No directory specified for FlexFileSet.

… when combined with this directive

>
	"${app.dir}/${rsl.name}.swc" />
>

I’m not gonna go into the nuts and bolts of the build file or even attempt to explain what that error means. I am familiar with compiling applications and modules from the Terminal and pretty much love doing most things from the terminal rather than relying on tools in eclipse, but i thought to bring experience down to a playing ground for a project that will be handed off to a client at some point, go with flex ant tasks. It’s well documented. Google finds most answers. Etc. But there are subtle changes to syntax that i am unfamiliar with when it comes to create a build file targeting the command line tools of the SDK.

In any event, it baffled me why this command would not work. It syntactically looked correct to me. The compiler directive is spelled correctly, the option variable is the correct path… wtf. Well just like the -library-path option i suppose you had to remove the directory that the SWC lives in from the variable and add it as a dir property.

"${app.dir}">
	"${rsl.name}.swc" />
>

Works! All is fine… but it took a hell of a long time to figure that out. Thought i would post this for any Terminal monkeys out there that run across this issue when building an ant file for compiling rsls into your application.

Was I bone-head for 2 hours? Probably…. feel free to leave a comment.

[Update February 3rd, 2009] – Ryan Taylor sent a solution that he uses (after being welcomed by my wordpress comments failure), which i find pretty elegant and will use in the future.

>
       "${libs}/MyLibrary.swc">
           "MyLibrary.swf" />
           "" />
    >
>

Thanks, Ryan!

Errata or just a helpful hint?

todd anderson — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 01:14:35 +0000

For those of you who have a copy of the Adobe Air Create-Modify-Reuse book that myself and Marc Leuchner and Matt Wright (of NoBien fame) authored, we hope you are enjoying it and i also may have a bit of errata for Chapter 1 if you are running Leopard. For those of you who don’t have a copy of the book (go buy it) and/or are running Leopard and want to use the Flex SDK command line tools, this may be of interest…

In Chapter 1 of the Adobe AIR Create-Modify-Reuse book, The Development Environment, it states that in order to set a PATH variable for your command line tools that you should:

1. Open the Terminal and type > open -e .profile
2. Add the path to the /bin folder of your SDK installation (I paraphrased… but you get the idea)

In Tiger this is all well and good, and if you are running in Tiger you can drop off or read on if you intend to upgrade to Leopard. Setting system paths in Leopard has changed and you no longer have a .profiles file in your User directory to which you can add/append paths. The following steps are what i took to add a path to the Flex SDK command line tools under Leopard:

1. Open the Terminal and navigate to /etc/paths.d
2. Create a file named ‘flex’ – (sans quotes)
3. Enter the following command: > pico flex
4. Enter: /Applications/flex_sdk_3/bin
5. Exit and Save

You will need to restart your computer.

*Note: /Applications/flex_sdk_3/bin points to the /bin directory of my Flex 3 SDK installation, change as you see fit to your installation.

I can’t go into the long and short of why this needs to take place in Leopard, but that will get you up and running with the command line tools if running under Leopard; i can however tell you i used the following to set me on the right path (no pun intended):

here and here

I apologise if anyone had purchased the book and tried to go through Chapter 1 with a Leopard installation. I did not know that setting PATH variables had changed and I was running Tiger when written and up until about a couple weeks ago when my HD went on the lam and i was greeted by a series of ‘Do Not Enter’ and ‘Missing File’ icons on start-up… all is well though, and they replaced my HD and installed Leopard for free!

For those of you have a copy of the book, i hope you are enjoying it. For those who are trying to get the tools up and running and just switched to Leopard i hope this is useful.

Flash on Tap : Boston

todd anderson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 01:08:37 +0000

Beer and Flash.

Now, i plead guilty to introducing the two from time to time … and sometimes more of one than the other. : )

… and here comes an opportunity to mingle micro-brew tasting with some of the most intelligent minds in the business… and in Boston no less!

Flash on Tap is in Boston from October 7th until the 9th. Get you tickets while the super early and early bird special last!

Yet another post about Astro

todd anderson — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:25:21 +0000

If you read MXNA, you probably have stopped checking quite some time ago because every post is about Astro…
but if you are interested in another way to set up your projects in FlexBuilder to target FP10 without having to muck about with files in the frameworks folder of your original Flex3 SDK installation this post may shed some light.

I am a workspace fanatic when it comes to development. I like things tidy, and when i start a new client project or go into some new exploration that involves multiple projects, i create a new workspace. The great thing about workspaces for me, aside from keeping things neat in my head, is that each new project you create in that workspace inherits from any default settings. So when the big news hit and i wanted to check out the latest SDK, i created a new workspace and followed most of the excellent directions already available on the adobe open source site. I only strayed a little in how i went about setting my workspace up so that every new project i created in it was *almost* set for development targeted at FP10 without having to run through the process each time.

The following is the process i took to only mess with the files from the nightly build and set defaults for a single workspace in order to play around with the current features available in Astro:

1. Download Flash Player 10 codenamed Astro.
2. Download the nightly build and unzip to some directory. (for me that is /Applications/flex_sdk_3.0.1.1728
3. Open FlexBuilder or Eclipse (if you have the plugin) and create a new workspace. (ie. ~/Documents/workspace/astro).
4. Create a new project.
5. Navigate to Project>Properties
6. Select the Flex Compiler option
7. Under Flex SDK version, click Configure Flex SDKs…
8. In the Preferences (Filtered) window, select Add
9. Navigate to the installation of your nightly build. (ie. /Applications/flex_sdk_3.0.1.1728)
10. Add a new name for the SDK… you should see something like so:

””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””’

11. Click OK, Then tick the checkbox next to the newly added sdk in the Installed Flex SDKs window.
12. Click Apply, then OK.
13. Then back in the Project Properties folder, under Use a specific SDK, if the newly added SDK isn’t selected, select it.
14. Under the Required Flash Player Version, change the value to 10.0.0
15. In the Project Properties window on the left side, select Flex Build Path> Library Path.
16. Expand the SDK you just set as default, and select the playerglobal.swc and Remove it.
17. Click Add SWC, and navigate to the player 10 swc from your nightly build SDK installation (ie. /Applications/flex_sdk_3.0.1.1728/frameworks/libs/player/10/playerglobal.swc)
18. Click Apply, then OK.
19. Open up the flex-config.xml file from the Astro SDK installation and update the settings as described in the first part of the Command-line Compiler instructions from here.

Thats it! Only 19 steps… that seems like a lot. In any case, in ensures that any project you now build under that workspace will default to using the targeted SDK. You will still have to manually change the Required Flash Version (from step 14) before you compile a new project, but other than that when you want to tinker with the nightly build – and not mess with your stable Flex 3 SDK release that other projects in other workspaces are targeting – just hop over to that workspace.

Good reading:
Ryan Stewart – Flash Player 10 codename “Astro” goes beta
Tinic Uro – Adobe Is Making Noise series
Keith Peters – Astro Dynamic Sound!
Josh Tynjala – Gratuitous Text Effects

Prana and compiled classes

todd anderson — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:58:51 +0000

I have recently gotten into incorporating Prana – the Inversion of Control framework of AS3 created by Christophe Herreman- into my projects. I gotta say, it’s beautiful piece of work and makes me rethink my approach to the architecture of applications again.

I don’t want to go into IoC and dependency injection and how your applications can truly benefit by using the Prana framework, as this post may get pretty long and these references are much better reading than my rambling:

Christophe’s blog: http://www.herrodius.com/blog/
Martin Fowler’s Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency injection pattern
the hollywood principle

What i did want to bring up is that i had a small problem with the workflow and how i develop. Which is my problem, of course but nonetheless…

One important thing to remember is that the context file is an external file that is loaded by the application at runtime. This means you will need to have all the possible classes your application may use already compiled into the SWF in order for the objects to be instantiated and your application to work. If you are typing to interfaces, this could prove to be a bit of a problem. You could create a reference for each class that may be needed in another class that is known to be compiled into the SWF – as Christophe explains in this post – but that always seemed dirty to me.

As is mentioned in the comments to that post, you can also go about adding each class using the -includes compiler option. Adding all possible classes using the -includes option makes for an excellent case on when to use additional compiler configurations, and presents the option to really just change the application context file and the additional configuration file as the project sees fit, without having to open up the source and tack on or remove dummy references to classes.

As an example, take for instance this application context file:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
>
	"app.properties" />
	
	"callbackHandler" class="com.example.responder.CallbackResponderImpl" />
	
	"connectionDelegate" class="com.example.business.ConnectionDelegateImpl">
		"rtmpURI" value="${app.rtmpURI}" />
		"client">
			>callbackHandler>
		>
	>
>

.. for each possible implementation of ConnectionDelegate and CallbackResponder that i may decide to swap in and out as the project seems fit, i would either need to hold a reference to each implementation in some class sure or be compiled into the SWF, or i could store them in an additional config file that can be added using the -load-config option with an additional value:

The prana.config file:

>
	"true">
		>com.example.reponder.CallbackResponderImpl>
		>com.example.business.ConnectionDelegateImpl>
	>
>

… drop that in my source folder and add the compiler option:

-load-config+=prana.config

From there, i could change the context as i see fit, update the prana.config file to reflect my preferences and just recompile the application without having to go into the source and muck about. It’s a little more clean for me and allows me to happily go about using the Prana framework.

The best part is that Prana is truthfully AS3 compliant! Meaning you can use it in your Flex AND AS3 projects, which cannot be said for some frameworks that claim to be AS3 and actually use class from the mx package… (looking at you as3lib). A huge pet-peeve of mine.
*Last i checked, the source under version control doesn’t seem to reflect the current changes Christophe has made, but they are included in the downloads.