Andrew Alderson Flex Developer

The other day out of shear curiosity I wanted to see if it was possible to create an AIR application that looked like the Microsoft Zune application.

I needed to do an update to the Drupal installation for my website today and my preferred way of working is to do the update locally and then ftp the new files up to my production server and run the database update (after backing everything up of course). When I went to do this today I realized that after moving to a new laptop last week I forgot to move the configuration files for my local WAMP server and I didn’t have them backed up (bad developer). Since I had already cleaned my old hard drive I needed to recreate my local configuration and I figured this time I would document it. This is mainly for my benefit but if someone else finds this useful that would be great.

It seems that when writing Actionscript I am so accustomed to doing things a certain way that often I forget there may be better ways to accomplish something. This happened recently on a project I am working on. I was creating the classes that defined the various user types and what permissions each type has. I decided that the best way to do this was to create a abstract ‘User’ class and subclass it to create each actual user type.

I little while ago I had to rebuild my laptop and when I did this I decided that I would encrypt my home directory. I have had a laptop stolen before and I will never really be sure what happened to the data on it. I figure that if I encrypt my home directory then at least all my data will be save if a thief removes the hard drive and tries to by pass the login. I decided that it was best to just encrypt the entire home directory so I would know that as long as all of my data was stored in my user folder it would be safe.

Oh, btw this is Windows 7 and EFS I am talking about.

I decided to take some time today an try out Flash Builder beta 2. There used to be a time when I was really excited about trying beta software but now with being so busy I tend to just pass. I was actually interested in trying the FlexUnit integration. All in all once I got it working it was really great and I am glad it has been added as a feature.

Problem: How do you implement invalidation in a non-visual class?

Solution: Use an instance of UIComponent to proxy the invalidation.

I recently ran into a problem with a drawing application I am working on. It wasn’t a major problem but I am sure someone else will run into it. The problem is with sending ByteArray's through WebORB as a parameter or a variable in a ValueObject.

After my first article on WebOrb and dates in PHP I ran into another problem when sending dates from Flex to a PHP class through WebORB. This time it was a date that was sent as a property of a Value Object and not a parameter of the method. I finally decided it was time to figure this out once and for all.

While poking around in the Flex SDK source code I came across an undocumented class called AsyncDispacther under \Flex Builder 3 Plug-in\sdks\3.2.0\frameworks\projects\rpc\src\mx\rpc and it reminded me of some of the tricks we used to use before Flash Player 9 to overcome problems we encountered.

Scenario: You need to validate user input in a TextInput component for legal values.

Solution : Use the 'textInput' event to intercept the characters a users types before they are committed and cancel the committing of the character if it is illegal.