News - Eric Feminella

AS3 EventManager

In an effort to develop one single, centralized event handling system for all of my applications I have developed a new EventManager for ActionScript 3.0 based on the concepts of previous AS2 EventManagers such as the ones from Jeff Tapper as well as the Cairngorm EventManagement system.

The EventManager is a simple class that you can use to centralize listeners and broadcast events from anywhere in an application. It is an absolutely essential part of all of my ActionScript 3.0 Applications.
Click here to download the AS3 EventManager

July 12, 2006 News

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ActionScript 3.0 / Flex 2.0 Local Debugger

Today I re-built my ActionScript Debugger from the ground up for ActionScript 3.0 / Flex 2.0. If you are not familiar with the ActionScript debugger it is a simple Local Debugger which recursively traces out various complex types such as Objects, Arrays etc to a seperate .swf file.

I will continue to build on the current functionality to take advantage of the various new type-checking features in ActionScript 3.0.

To see an example of the Debugger in Action click here

July 3, 2006 News

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ActionScript 3.0 / Flex 2.0 / E4X RSS 1.0 Blog Reader

One of the best new implemented ECMA features in ActionScript 3.0 is E4X – a native XML dataType in ActionScript 3.0. If you are traditionally used to traversing an xml document in actionScript 2.0 I am sure that you are more than familiar with recursive for-loops and endless firstChild.childNodes[i]… type syntax. E4X is a much better (not to mention standard) approach to parsing XML. You can now simply target a node and use for-each loops to loop thru child nodes.

I built a simple aggregator for my Blog in Flex 2.0 using E4X and it was a piece of cake.

AS3E4XRSSBlogReader

July 2, 2006 News

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ActionScript 3.0 / Flash Player 9GC (Garbage Collector)

Over the past few months I have been spending alot of my free time learning the new API’s available in ActionSctipt 3.0.

One thing that will always be crucial to quality Application development is memory allocation and code optomization ensuring this. Inevitably with all of the new features available in ActionScript 3.0 this is more nessasary than ever before. I found a great article by Grant Skinner about the new Garbage collector in Flash Player 9 which is a must read for anyone interested in ActionScript 3.0.

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2006/06/as3_resource_ma.html

June 30, 2006 News

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Flex 2.0 Release / Flash Professional 9 beta 1.0

Would you look at this! I just get back from vacation and Flex 2.0 has been officially released. And if that were not good enough Adobe has also released Flash Professional 9 beta 1.

My first day back and there are some really big things brewing. Time to get Flex 2.0 and download the trial of Flash Professional 9! Today is a good day.

The days of Flex 1.5 are finally coming to an end. Time for a real IDE.

To learn more about Flash Professional 9 and Flex 2.0 visit:
Flash Professional 9
Flash Player 9
Flex 2.0

June 29, 2006 News

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FlashAJAXBridge API

I wrote an API which allows interoperability between AJAX, Flash 8 and Flex 1.5. The FlashAJAXBridge API consists of a few simple ActionScript 2.0 methods which allow you to call javascript methods that target document elements and reset their dataProviders. The API also can invoke calls to an instance of the XMLHTTPRequest object which makes discreet calls to the server for loading external xml documents.

I made a simple example that demonstrates the methods that are available for registering javascript functions which can be invoked in Flash or Flex. A cool little extra that I added is the FlashObject instance is set using attributes from an xml-config document to embed the swf. The config document also specifies which div element to write the FlashObject to.

You can view an example of the API by clicking on the link below:
FlashAJAXBridge.html

May 26, 2006 JavaScript / News

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