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These past few weeks I have been building applications leveraging the Flash Platform as a whole – Flash, Flex and ActionScript. I have been spending the majority of my time at work in Flex Builde working with mxml, and ActionScript 2.0 of course.
In short, I am very excited about the upcoming release of ActionScript 3.0 in Flex 2.0 as well as Flash Player 9, due to be released this spring.
I am quite sure the majority of readers who are Flash Platform Developers are familiar with parsing XML documents in ActionScript 2.0. And though it is fun to do and most of us already have plenty of AS 2.0 parsing utilities such as XMLSA, in reality it is quite cumbersome to say the least.
Welcome to E4X, quite simply ECMAScript for XML (E4X), and in my opinion this is the what has been needed all along. I have written many APIs which convert XML objects to strongly type data structures, similar in some ways to how mxml is converted to native ActionScript objects at compiletime in Flex. This may be appropriate for certain applications but when it comes to just parsing a document E4X makes much more since. What E4X does is incredibly simple and logical. Since the XML document is contained inside an XML object you then have access to all of it’s properties, which are nothing more than the documents nodes, attributes, namespaces etc.
ActionScript 3.0 will have support for this new standard which we can take advantage of without having to worry about the limitations of most browsers at the moment since none of the mainstream browsers are currently supporting E4X. Check out www.ecma-international.org to learn more.
Every now and then I go through an extension phase where I am on a quest for the coolest Firefox extensions out there. I found about 30 new extensions that were definetely worth installing which I will post this blog once I have time to write a quick description for them all. One that is worth talking about is the “JS and CSS View source options which are added to the context menu in Firefox. This extension is pretty cool if you only want a real quick look. You can download it here
Recently, I wrote a simple AJAX debugger which can be useful in the debugging of complex types such as Objects, Arrays, JSON etc.
The AJAX Debugger traces out all inherited and “own” properties of user defined Object instances, properties/values of an Object, indexes of an Array, etc. – to a div with an id of “console” within an application.
To use the AJAX Debugger, simply include debugger.js in your application during development and create a div on the page with an id of “console” to serve as an output panel (I plan to implement the creation of the console div automatically in the next release).
To log output to the console, use the debugger’s trace function:
1 2 3 4 5 6 | // whereas the first param is an object of any type to trace // and the second param instructs the debugger to recursively // trace out the object or not. trace (object, true); |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 | trace({ 'name': 'AJAX Debugger', 'build': 1.0 }, true); // Outputs the following to the "console" div: // Found instance of type : Object // .name = AJAX Debugger // .build = 1 |
An upgrade to version 1.0 will be made within the next few weeks, allowing for the ability to launch the console in a separate window independent of the application itself.
An example of can be found
here
The AJAX Debugger can be downloaded
here.
Feel free to email me with your thoughts and / or ideas to make the Debugger better.
