The site has been down due to a malware hack. I apologize for any inconvenience caused. Some of my more popular articles have been restored. Comments have been disabled for the time being until a more secure solution can be implemented.
Robotlegs is a light-weight, pure AS3 micro-architecture that has developed some intense devotion amongst the Flash community recently. Created by Shaun Smith, it provides a mechanism for wiring your objects together in a decoupled way, and through the use of automated metadata based dependency injection, Robotlegs removes boilerplate code in an application.
If you’re familiar with PureMVC, you’ll find lots of similarities in Robotlegs and then some – cool features such as Dependency Injection. In this tutorial, I shall demonstrate how to build a typical Flash site with Robotlegs, similar to the one in my PureMVC Flash Site tutorial. We shall examine how to set up a Robotlegs application to load an xml file and send user events from the navigation to the framework.
In this final installment of my series of tutorials on using Ant with Flex Builder, I’ll show you how to create a Preloader asset in the Flash IDE and export that as a SWC to be used in your Actionscript source code.
To begin this tutorial, please make sure you have set up your workspace as suggested in Part 1.
Part 4b of the Ant series expands on Part 4a by adding a Flash UI Component to the SWC. Please review Part 4a before proceeding with this tutorial.
To begin this tutorial, please make sure you have set up your workspace as suggested in Part 1.
First off, if you’ve been waiting for this installment of my series of tutorials on Ant, I offer my sincere apologies. I’ve been sidetracked by iPhone development and haven’t been able to find time to finish off these tutorials. As promised, here’s a follow up to my previous tutorials.
In Part 4a, I shall show you how to compile a Flash library symbol as a SWC, add this SWC to your Actionscript classpath and compile your application with the Flex MXMLC compiler.
To begin this tutorial, please make sure you have set up your workspace as suggested in Part 1.
In Part 3 of this tutorial, we shall use a combination of the MXMLC compiler and JSFL script to compile an external SWF which will be loaded into your main SWF.
To begin this tutorial, please make sure you have set up your workspace as suggested in Part 1.
In Part 2 of this tutorial, we’ll compile an ActionScript 3 only project simply by launching the MXMLC compiler with an Ant task in Flex Builder.
To begin this tutorial, please make sure you have set up your workspace as suggested in Part 1.
As more Flash developers migrate towards using tools like Flex Builder and FDT for code editing, some of us have found that switching between the Flash IDE and Flex Builder doesn’t necessarily present the most seamless workflow. Compiling with the Flash IDE is slow and cumbersome; building an entire Flash project with code in Flex Builder doesn’t integrate nicely the designer’s workflow either. Until Flash Catalyst becomes available and magically cures all our designer-developer workflow headaches, what we need is a way to leverage each tool for what it does best, ie. the Flash IDE for drawing and layout, and Flex Builder for code.
Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes implemented using the Java language. Ant uses XML to describe the build process and its dependencies, so no knowledge of Java is necessary for running Ant in your Flex Builder environment. By default the XML file is named build.xml.
In this series of tutorials, I will show you how to use Ant to create a workflow between the Flash IDE and Flex Builder. In Part 1 of this tutorial, we shall use Ant and JSFL to launch a FLA to publish a SWF.
If you’re thinking of hosting your SWFs on a content delivery network to improve the performance of your Flash application, or attempting to load a third-party SWF hosted on another domain into your application, be aware that loading and scripting SWFs from another domain posts a whole set of security issues, namely that of Cross-Domain Scripting. Due to the Flash Player 9′s security sandbox, when you load a SWF from another domain into a SWF hosted on your domain, by default, you will not be able to operate on the child SWF without it specifically granting permission.
Before proceeding with this tutorial, I highly recommend that you to read the Adobe Flash Player 9 Security White Paper. This 51-page document, although thorough in many aspects, unfortunately left out crucial details that one would need in order to successfully perform cross-domain scripting. Another indispensable reference would be Colin Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0, in particular, Chapter 19 on Flash Player Security Restrictions and Chapter 28 on Loading External Display Assets.
Let’s get started!
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.
