There is a really good post on InfoQ of the top 10 development mistakes in Flex Development. Most of these things a Flash developer just knows and a traditional web developer may not. To all the traditional developers out their building Flex this is for you. Remember this is basically a somewhat optimized version of Flash so you have to watch out for the traditional problems of Flash, memory alloc, client cpu, deep linking, etc.
Just wanted to post some resources for Python regarding Flex Development. I like Python, its a clean dynamic language that’s 10 times as fast to program as most languages. For AMF use PyAMF at http://pyamf.org/. Another great resource whether you use Python or not is TRAC at http://trac.edgewall.org/. It hooks into SVN and provides a face to your version control. And after you have TRAC installed, check out MYLYN at http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/. It hooks into your TRAC repo and reflects bugs right there in eclipse. You can also use it with other bug trackers too so check it out if you’re not using it and you have an existing bug tracker. Of course you can use PyDev for Eclipse at http://pydev.sourceforge.net/ but I’m a solid TextMate fan and been using it since it was released.
This great post provides a brief tutorial on how to use Google Analytics to track events and what not in your Flash applications.
Until Flex Builder 3 Stand Alone includes Ant built in you will have to install it separately. For those that are not familiar with Eclipse, this can be tricky to install.The following is the revised steps for Flex Builder 3 Stand Alone.
That’s it! You now have Apache Ant support in your standalone Flex Builder 3 install.Go to Window > Other View > Ant and Click OK. You now have the Ant view
So after reading Skinner’s post on AS3 Resource management I have one thing to say, CLEAN YOUR CODE!! That means removing all listeners, and nulling out all of your visualloaders, etc. Best thing to do is in all of your views have an initialize function and a clean function. This way you can add listeners in your init and remove them in your clean function. Also any displayobjects that you remove from the stage never get deleted, at least not that I know of and I build this stuff all day. So everything that you have in that class is going to remain in memory. So if you can, remove them in your clean function. Anyway, that’s all for now… have you all seen Google’s new app engine? HOT!!!
Adobe has a great article on improving Flex performance. Its a definite must read just for the slew of hints and tricks. Alot of it deals with using Runtime Shared Libraries and a few optimization techniques when compiling your libraries. Good stuff for all you Flex developers.
The little AIR app we created for the Adobe AIR release got best of show, tied with Buzzword! Check out the article… http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9878909-2.html
Following the release of Adobe AIR, my company, the ichameleon/group, has been working with Adobe and the New York Times on a small AIR demonstration app called SHIFD. SHIFD is an awesome little app that saves data you see online and you can pick it up on the website, your mobile phone, iphone app or the AIR based desktop app. The Adobe Air app was written entirely in AJAX wrapped around the Adobe AIR shell. You can signup for an account at http://www.shifd.com or download some of the free tools at http://www.shifd.com/tools/ Here’s a great article on SHIFD
Here’s a great little code snippet that shows off the power of AIR and flex.
bitmapData = new BitmapData(this.width,this.height); bitmapData.draw(this,new Matrix()); var bitmap : Bitmap = new Bitmap(bitmapData); var jpg:JPEGEncoder = new JPEGEncoder(); var ba:ByteArray = jpg.encode(bitmapData); newImage = File.desktopDirectory.resolvePath("Images/" + fileName.text + ".jpg"); fileStream = new FileStream(); fileStream.open(newImage, FileMode.UPDATE); fileStream.writeBytes(ba);
Props to EverythingFlex for this example…