Posts Tagged ‘as3’

Posted: 3rd December 2008
Tags: as3, Flex and Air, Mate, RIA
Posted in Flex and Air
Comments: No Comments »

I just wanted to share with you a great framework I have been using recently called Mate (pronounced ma-tay).

Developed by the guys at ASFusion Mate is a great framework that features MXML declared event handling, dependency injection and best of all it is really easy to use and implement (It even has a way of reusing your existing Cairngorm commands. Additionally in the next version there will be an infrastructure for mocking out your services and really provides a clean architecture for Flex apps.

The framework is provided as a .swc file you can drop straight into your /libs folder and supports both Flex 2 and Flex 3. The only downside to the framework is the documentation does not reflect the latest .swc and is a little light in places, however the forums are excellent and very active and there is a good selection of examples.

I will be blogging about this in more details soon, but wanted to share my initial thoughts and urge you to look at this framework as it is really worth it.

Permalink | dzone | No Comments »

Posted: 10th June 2008
Tags: AIR, as3, cairngorm, Flex and Air
Posted in Flex and Air
Comments: 3 Comments »

In this final part on building a medium to large scale flex or Air app using Cairngorm, I will look at how I approach the service locator and use flex builders built in responder mechanism to handle service call responses.
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Permalink | dzone | 3 Comments »

Posted: 10th June 2008
Tags: AIR, as3, cairngorm, Flex and Air
Posted in Flex and Air
Comments: 2 Comments »

In Parts 1 & 2 we setup Cairngorm and our models. In Part 3 we will look at how we will make use of the controller, using commands to handle events, chaining together a series of commands using Cairngorm’s SequenceCommand and creating custom CairngormEvents.
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Permalink | dzone | 2 Comments »

Posted: 8th June 2008
Tags: AIR, as3, cairngorm, Flex and Air
Posted in Flex and Air
Comments: 8 Comments »

In Part 1 we created a new Flex project and setup the classes we that will be used to support our application architecture. In this part we will look at how we build our application around these classes.
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Permalink | dzone | 8 Comments »

Posted: 6th June 2008
Tags: AIR, as3, cairngorm, Flex and Air
Posted in Flex and Air
Comments: 2 Comments »

This is the first part of a four part series on my own approach to using Cairngorm to build an enterprise Rich Internet App.

In the first part, I cover setting up your project and creating the foundation classes that will hand our Rich Internet Application together.
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Permalink | dzone | 2 Comments »

Posted: 6th June 2008
Tags: AIR, as3, cairngorm, Flex and Air, mvc
Posted in Flex and Air
Comments: 1 Comment »

The Flex scene seems to be lacking in beginners’ guides to Cairngorm (maybe they are just alluding my Google searches) so I have put together (larger than hoped) a four part series that guides you through how I use Cairngorm.

For those of you who have read my articles on Tom Bray’s EasyMVC, this may sound surprising. I have previously posted articles on how to scale up EasyMVC into a Micro-architecture similar to Cairngorm. However, the rationale behind these articles was to help developers who implement EasyMVC and find their app out grows the implementation that Tom originally presented, and not as a blueprint for architecting apps. EasyMVC is a great framework for small Flex apps and Flex widgets where using Cairngorm would be the equivalent of taking a sledgehammer to a walnut. If you know in advance you application is going to be fairly sizable, use Cairngorm (or something like PureMVC if you prefer).

Before I get started, there is a slight disclaimer: I am going to present my own approach to using Cairngorm which does deviate from the documented approach, namely around services. I feel it is simpler, but you may beg to differ. I do not present this as the best solution or a perfect solution, but it is a tried and tested solution which hopefully will get more developers understanding and using Cairngorm where appropriate.

In essence this series should give you all you need to know to get started with Cairngorm.

Contents:

Part 1 - Setting up a project for Cairngorm
Part 2 - The Model
Part 3 - Commands
Part 4 - Services
Cairngorm Demo Source Files

Permalink | dzone | 1 Comment »

Posted: 7th May 2008
Tags: AIR, as3, Flex and Air, scrollbar
Posted in Flex and Air
Comments: 4 Comments »

A quick tip if you have a dynamic scroll bar and want to bind it’s maxScrollPosition to a value at runtime unfortunately you can’t use the MXML binding, i.e. maxScrollPosition={value}.

Alternatively you need to set the value programatically in an event handler, AND importantly call updateDisplayList() on the scrollbar. i.e.

 
                <!--[CDATA[
                        private function handleSlideChange():void {
                                scroll.maxScrollPosition = slider.value;
                                scroll.invalidateDisplayList();
                        }
                ]]-->

Permalink | dzone | 4 Comments »

Posted: 4th March 2008
Tags: ActionScript, AIR, as3, easymvc, Flex and Air, RIAs
Posted in Flex and Air
Comments: 5 Comments »

EasyMVC is a lightweight architecture process for Adobe Flex and AIR first proposed by Tom Bray of SearchCoders and Chatopica. This is the second part covering Service calls, of a two part article on how to take that architecture and scale up to a simplified cairngorm style architecture when you outgrown EasyMVC.

Click here to read an introduction on EasyMVC
Click here to read Scaling up EasyMVC part 1.

Firstly I would like to add some clarification as to the motivation for these articles. I have had a few emails asking what the point of these articles are as I am just recreating Cairngorm. I hope these articles will satisfy two goals. Firstly having discussed EasyMVC and evangelised about it a little I feel I should offer a way to scale this up when your application grows, if not you could end up with a huge EasyMVC controller class that has 30 or so event handlers in addition to service calls etc which will get unmanageable, especially in a team of developers. Secondly I hope these articles will give an insight into how Cairngorm works from a simplified perspective. Cairngorm is an excellent architecture but it is intimidating for beginners and intermediates alike. This Scaled up EasyMVC architecture provides a simplified lightweight version of Cairngorm and also provides an upgrade path for EasyMVC adopters.
In the first article we looked at how we can borrow the command design pattern (as used in Cairngorm) to split out our centralised event handlers into separate classes or commands. Firstly this makes your code more organised and easier to locate specific functionality when you application grows but also provides you with the basis for the next step in handling remote calls to web services, be that SOAP, REST or AMF services.

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Permalink | dzone | 5 Comments »