Useful Closures use-cases in Flex

As flex is based on Actionscripts 3, it is possible to leverage some of the features of an ECMA-based language not readily available in strongly-typed languages.  Most Java developers will probably ignore the ability to use powerful features such as closures when the use-case simply makes sense. Consider the following:

Localizing Flex Applications

In my attempt to localize my flex application, it quickly became evident how simple it is to do basic localization in flex. As soon as I tried to implement more complex features, I realized how complicated it can become (e.g. add special characters, support multiple locales, flex builder problems, etc). In the interest of sharing the wealth, I'll describe the steps I took, so I don't have to keep on repeating some of these in future development efforts. These steps are:

Mavenizing a Flex Project with multiple artifacts

  I was asked to include a Flex project within the current build process in place (maven2 based). Now, I like maven for many reasons which I'm not going to explain in this entry, however I would like to say a bit about my experience with such a "mavenization" if you will. Most Flex projects I've been involved are developed either directly in Flex Builder (Fb3) and/or compile using an Ant task. Nothing wrong with this approach, however Maven encourages a convention that may not necessarily be embraced in a traditional Flex Application. I hope to explain what I mean by this in the next paragraphs.

My Journey into using efflex

As I tried to introduce powerful animations to personal RIA project, I came across this project called Efflex. The demos showed a lot of potential. I was very impressed with some of the nice features to improve ViewStack selection (particularly the Flip3D and Cube3D demos). As my excitement drove me to use it, I found so many problems integrating to it, particularly with the following:

1. There were no SWC files to use (the 2 provided never worked). 
2. Building the source required FlexBuilder as well as to understand the project layout.
3. Some of the code was not committed, hence the compilation failed in so many ways.
4. There were dependencies that were not documented.

I took this as a personal challenge and I can happily report that I made it work. I'd like to describe what I had to do to make it happen in case others go through this problem (as I suspect it's the case based on some of the postings I read on the site).

Alternate Tooltip for <mx:List /> items

I spent sometime trying to understand ways to add tooltips for items within a <mx:List ..> component. As I naively used the dataTipFunction(), it was pretty evident (at least in my case) that I needed something whereby I can have more control, a more robust solution than the out-of-the-box solution. This is when I decided to use the itemRollOver and itemRollOut events and corresponding handlers.

Lessons learned at 360Flex

It's time to reflect a bit about the latest 360Flex. This was a good time to learn about Hardware integration with the Flash Platform. Here we have integration with Arduino boards (via as3glue or merapi).  Also, I learned a bit about JComm as well as how these sensors can send Event objects whereby one can react and listen (think credit card readers, robots, etc). Nice possibilities that make so much sense for thick client applications using Adobe Air... Very exciting.

Monkey Patching in Flex

I recently attended 360Flex. It was an excellent conference. I thought I knew some Flex, but I was certainly not aware of how much others are doing with Flex, Actionscript and the Flash Platform in general. Very interesting concepts. One of the nice concepts I recently learned while at San Jose was "Monkey-Patching".  Fortunately, I had the chance to practice how to use it after the conference and learned so much about the internals of some Flex components.  Here is what I did.

Flex: DateTimeAxis and ColumnChart components

I love flex. It is a framework where you can do great things, however there are a number of "gotchas" as with every framework. Not necessarily a bad thing, so long as it is documented properly. This is what I found when using the ColumnChart component within the data-visualization framework of flex in combination with the DateTimeAxis for the xField. I had an object using the following structure:

public class MyChartItem {
    public var time:Number;
    public var amount:int;
}

Notice that one of the properties represents the current time. It's represented by a numeric field (Number type). This model should allow for an exact representations of time when serializing a remote object back to its counterpart in ActionScript.