Global Error handling in Flash Player 10.1

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

A few years back I had the need to write a global exception management framework in order to provide a means from which unhandled errors could be handled gracefully throughout an application. Initially, I assumed there must be a listener available which could be added to SystemManager or Application, and from there all unhandled errors could be caught; however, after… Continue Reading

Maven dependency resolution with javacio.us

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Ever need to determine what versions of a specific Maven dependency are available in a public repository? Or more importantly, determine if a dependency even exists in a public repository? If so, then javacio.us, a free, subscription based service available to anyone with a Google account can be used to help quickly and easily resolve maven dependencies. Usage is simple:… Continue Reading

Thoughts on Cairngorm 3

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

A week or so prior to MAX, the Cairngorm committee had a rather interesting discussion, during which Alex outlined what the team at Adobe Technical Services had been considering for Cairngorm 3. The meeting was focused on providing everyone with an overview of the collective ideas which Adobe had been gathering internally for some time now, and to also inquire… Continue Reading

Advanced Flex 4

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

This morning I received a copy of the new Book Advanced Flex 4, written by my friend Elad Elrom and Shashank Tiwari, with contributions by Charlie Schulze. Upon opening the package and browsing the first few pages, I was quite flattered to read: “I would also like to thank Eric Feminella who has inspired me, mentored me and helped me… Continue Reading

Vector Iterator for Flex

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

One of the many welcome additions to the Flex 3.4 SDK is the inclusion of the Vector class. Vectors in particular are especially welcome as they provide compile time type safety over what would otherwise not be available when implementing custom solutions, such as a typed collection. Essentially, Vectors are just typed Arrays. And while not as robust or powerful,… Continue Reading

Simple RPC Instrumentation in Flex

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

On occasion developers may find a need to quickly measure the time it takes for a request to a remote service to return a response back to the client without the need to employ an automated testing tool to perform the instrumentation. This information can prove quite valuable for performing application diagnostics on the client and, when measured in terms… Continue Reading