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What to expect from a dev team?
June 3rd, 2009
There are many dimensions to software development: scope, duration, cost and quality. Software development is an art, not a standard process. It is not mass production where you can quantify and predict everything. Attempting to get fixed values on all these dimensions is a big mistake. Here is why. Customers often come to me with […]
php|tek 09
May 26th, 2009
(photo by Marco Tabini) I had the pleasure to attend php|tek this year in Chicago. This conference was organized by php|architect. I attended some very interesting presentations such as “Dissecting an MVC Application”, “Alternate Databases”, “Of Haystacks and Needles” and “Seven Steps to Better OOP Code”. I enjoyed the Pecha Kucha presentations. These were very […]
Application Domain and External SWF Loading
April 6th, 2009
Why do we care about application domains? I worked on a project that required me to load and unload SWF files into a bigger application (loading mini-games into a virtual world). Every time I loaded a mini-game, it would never unload when I exited it. That will keep accumulating until the app slows down to […]
AS3 Mystery: null, false, 0, “”, NaN
April 2nd, 2009
This week I’ve been running unit tests and couldn’t understand why some of them were failing for no obvious reason. To understand why some expressions evaluated to true when they were supposed to be false. I know that I should be careful with null vs false values, but never could I have imagined that the […]
Flex 3D and Wiimote
March 29th, 2009
I haven’t blogged in a while. Too much work to catch after the conference. I’m having a lot of fun with 3D in Flex lately. I found this really great open source library papervision3d. It’s incredibly easy to use. I got the hello world to run in my existing Flex app in under 5 minutes. […]
lastIndexOf with RegEx?
February 6th, 2009
I was quite surprised that Flex did not have a way to get the index of the LAST matching substring. I want get the index of a word’s first character based on the cursor’s position (I’m working with the text property of a UITextField). To achieve that I’m getting all text in front of that […]
Flex Randomness
January 13th, 2009
The only reason why your Flex app should do something randomly is by your using the Math.random() function. You can argue about the UIDUtil.createUID() and such but you get the point. Today I witnessed randomness as never before. Try to run this code (Flex 3.2) […]
if (value is Object) problem
January 8th, 2009
To my knowledge, everything is AS3 an object. Functions, Strings, Arrays… So how do we check if our value is actually an Object? I had this problem in a for loop. I wanted to treat primitive types, Arrays and Objects differently. My first reaction was to test for Arrays, then for Objects and handle the […]
Weak Event Listeners Warning
November 15th, 2008
An object that has no references to it will be eventually garbage-collected. An event listener is also a reference, thus preventing it from being removed from memory. In order to allow your objects to be garbage-collected, you can either remove all listeners from it or use weak event listeners instead (don’t forget to remove other […]
Garbage collection with SWF loading
September 25th, 2008
I ran some performance tests today. I made an interesting discovery. When you load a SWF that has elements exported for ActionScript, the class definitions of these elements are stored in the application’s domain and take up memory (we already knew that). But whether you load these definitions into the SWF’s context or your main […]