I have recently been working a lot with sub applications in Flex. Sub applications are a great way to brake a large application up into smaller more manageable parts, but also provide the potential for some really exciting ideas.
One of the biggest problems when using sub applications is the security violations that the Flash platform throws up. These are seen in the debugging console, and with most Flex projects the number and frequency of violations, mean the console becomes impossible to use.
Today I discovered Arthropod. Arthropod is an AIR application that offers a console that you can log to from a SWF (Flex, AIR, Flash applications or movies). All you need to do is include a simple class, and then log your debugging messages like so:
Debug.log("my message");
Arthropod uses the local connection to communicate with the desktop application, and although currently only supports AS3, it should be possible to get an AS2 version running too.
This means I can now debug to Arthropod and don't need to use the default flex builder debug console. However Arthropod also allows you to do a lot more, by debugging applications in their live environment. For more info check out http://arthropod.stopp.se
If you are interested in developing large application in Flex, it’s a good idea to break up parts into modues or separate application. This encourages loose coupling, improves the ease of updating and out sourcing development.
If your project is an AIR application then you will probibly want to load those modules locally (rather than rely [...]
Question to ponder over the weekend.
You have a list of articles that scroll vertically in a desktop app.
When you click on an article to view in full you have navigation arrows to go to the next and previous article.
Do the buttons point up and down, to mimic scrolling on the previous screen?
Do they point left [...]
I am currently re-writing a huge chunk of our CMS front end. The majority of this is JavaScript previously written using Prototype and script.aculo.us and I am taking a jQuery hammer to it.
One of the biggest problems I faced when I first wrote the script was not being able to set parameters in call back [...]
I am currently working on a client side application written in AIR. I need to allow the user to drag a list of files onto the application and then validate them checking for file type and size.
I hit a problem with the user dragging folders, as they are handled as a file with a property [...]
