Over the past few years, pretty much ever since the iPod touch/iPhone came out and Steve Job’s said no flash on iPhone OS (iOS now) and that flash was a resource hog, etc the debate between Flash and JavaScript for client side scripting majority has really started to pick up steam. It seems almost every other day there is something in the news about how bad one is or how bad the other is, with Flash tending to be on the receiving end as of late (I’ve weighed in on this several months ago, here and here). In the past year or so I’ve been spending allot more time working with JavaScript, mostly because of my current career being focused heavily on SilverStripe powered web development, along side working on personal projects such as Code Bank or Halo Stats Archiever. But even with my own personal work I’ve noticed a dramatic dip in my Flash/Flex web RIAs, why?
Internet Explorer https no-cache no-load
January 29th, 2011Every Web Developer hates Internet Explorer, from its horrible non-w3c compliant Trident rendering engine to its equally terrible JavaScript engine every web developer has some kind of reason to despise it. I know I can hear you IE fan boys screaming but IE9 is so much better… that it may be but last time I checked it was a beta with no proposed release date. For us Flash Developers IE usually doesn’t pose much of an issue but turns out one of the worst of “modern” browsers on the web does cause some grief for us Flash Developers.
Working with Web Services in Flex (Using the Halo: Reach Stats API)
November 27th, 2010Working with a Web Service in Flex is really easy, especially when using Flex Builder 3 or Flash Builder 4. Flex Builder (and Flash Builder) comes with a built in tool that does a really good job taking a WSDL and building the ActionScript classes needed to interface with a web service. I’ve seen some issues using this tool at least in Flex Builder 3, for example the ever so annoying “There are no ports for the current service. Check that the WSDL file is correct or select another service”. Now it’s possible that this is related to the WSDL for the JSON service or Flex Builder 3 might just be getting something it doesn’t understand who knows. After the jump I’ll walk though building a very simple application that uses the Halo: Reach Stats API to fetch the current Challenges from the service. Due to restrictions on the API you will not be able to just take this sample code and have it work as I have omitted my API key for security reasons, as well view source is off for this swf.
Headless Building on Linux
August 24th, 2010Recently I started an experiment, the server powering this blog and the rest of my website is a Ubuntu Server machine with an Intel Core i7 processor @2.66ghz and 12gb of ram. I know a bit over kill for a web server hence why it has a ton of other things running on it that I’m not going to go into detail on. One of the projects I recently released (Halo Stats Archiver: Desktop Edition) has a ton of code in it north of 10,000 lines counting formatting, mxml, ActionScript and the ActionScript in some of the compiled libraries I wrote and use in HSA. Plus it comes with allot of assets 391 files [1.88mb] (not counting the files ADT builds), plus all the embedded assets. All in all it can take quite awhile to build it, and I’ve noticed sometimes Flex builder 3 just gives up the guts, it just doesn’t “Export for Release” it stews over it for awhile then the export dialog closes with no resulting AIR package. Likely this is due to the number of assets and the sheer number of lines of code.
So I decided to try and utilize my shiny i7 processor with 12gb of ram to build AIR applications sort of based on the idea of a render farm, but with only one machine instead of dozens. Now I have very limited knowledge of shell programming, or well I did coming into this endeavor so I spend many many hours looking searching the internet for information on how to do this and how to do that. Even once I figured out the basics on how to get user input and command line arguments I still had to figure out how to use adt and amxmlc. Hit the jump and I’ll go into detail on how I managed to get a few working scripts and a download link so you can use these files on your Linux box.
Application Release: Code Bank
July 30th, 2010
Code Bank is a code snippit manager with support for a local database as well as a shared database (serverside application required). Code Bank also has syntax highlighting for multiple languges including C++, ActionScript, Flex, HTML and SQL to name a few. Code Bank also has a simple revision history with a compare viewer so you can see the changes side-by-side between two revisions.
With the serverside application you can share a code snippit library between multiple users. If you would like to use the serverside application please use the contact form here to obtain information on this system.
You can download Code Bank from the Adobe AIR Marketplace or directly from this site.
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