At a recent FlashCodersNY meeting where the discussion centered around the subject of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern, it struck me that a lot of Flash developers, especially those coming from design backgrounds, did not see the value in using the MVC design pattern.

Well, I’m not here to make the case for using MVC but if you have spent enough time struggling with structuring an application so that it’s clearly represented by a set of well-defined relationships and responsibilities, you would’ve likely tried to implement some kind of MVC pattern. Now, some design pattern is certainly better none. Trouble is, every developer has his or her own approach to MVC. When a team of developers are working on the same project, things can get confusing pretty quickly if there are no common standards to adhere to. (more…)

Over the past couple of years, I’ve come to rely heavily on FDT for my Actionscript development work. An excellent plugin for the Eclipse IDE, FDT provides developers with a rich set of editing and refactoring tools unavailable in the Flash IDE. Back in the AS2 days, one can bypass the Flash IDE altogether and compile his or her SWF directly in FDT using the MTASC compiler. With the release of Flex Builder 2 (and now 3), one can compile AS3 projects directly using the Flex SDK.

Now, if you’re a fan of FDT, there’s no need to worry that you need to switch over to Flex Builder for your AS3 projects. The latest version of FDT (ver. 3), provides a way to compile your AS3 projects using the open source Flex SDK via the fcsh script. Instructions for doing so are available on the FDT forums. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to do so step-by-step. (more…)

I recently started looking into using PureMVC for our Flash projects at work. While the project site has plenty of great demos for one to download and examine, there aren’t enough tutorials out there that show step-by-step, how to start building an application using the framework. Fortunately, my friends over at 9M Media have put together an excellent series of articles on PureMVC to help get you started. Check it out for yourselves. (more…)

If you’re thinking of using Cairngorm in your Flex projects and would like a little help in getting started, David Tucker has prepared a great series of beginner tutorials on the subject.

In five lessons, Tucker leads the student from setting up the ModelLocator, Events, Commands and Controller classes, to using Business Delegates and Value Objects in the Service-to-Worker design pattern, finally ending with Best Practices. Each tutorial begins with some theory and explanations, then quickly segues to a hands-on video tutorial which demonstrates in great detail how all this is put together. (more…)

If you recently made the upgrade to Leopard and you’re a frequent user of the OSX Terminal application, you may find that the environment paths that you had set up for the bash shell no longer work. Previously in Tiger, one can easily define those paths by creating a .bash_profile or .profile configuration file in the user directory, or editing the system-wide configuration file /etc/.profile directly if you have root access.

While I personally have never been able to make the configuration files work in the user directory, I’ve had success setting my environment paths in /etc/.profile. However, along with many other components that got shuffled around in the latest release of OSX, those profile settings are no longer found in the same locations. Oh why o why, Apple? (more…)