James Echmalian

Flex developers in the Boston area: don’t miss Dave Coletta’s talk tomorrow night (5/13) about the automated test framework built into Buzzword. (If you’re new to the Flex world, you might not know that Buzzword is an on-line word processor written in Flex, and that Adobe liked it so much they bought it last year!) Dave will be presenting at the Boston Flex User Group meeting on the Adobe campus in Newton, MA. I heard an earlier version of Dave’s talk at 360|Flex Seattle last year, and learned a lot from his take on Flex development, and on software engineering in general.
For more about the meeting and the Boston Flex User Group, see http://bostonfug.org

Here is a Flex mini-application that illustrates the use of a local SharedObject to maintain application state on the client. This app also illustrates what I consider to be good division between MXML code and ActionScript code, leveraging the power of MXML for setup, configuration and event wiring, while encapsulating the sticky bits in ActionScript components. Source code is included. (more…)

Flex developers and authors might be familiar with a UIComponent’s rollOverEffect and rollOutEffect effects. These provide a means of causing an Effect to be played when the mouse cursor enters and/or leaves the region of the UIComponent. GlowEffect and ZoomEffect in particular make good rollover effects, straight out of the box. This feature is very easy to use, but there are some problems in getting the Effects to behave correctly, and so I did a bit of digging. (more…)

Thank you to all who listened to my talk today at 360|Flex: “Working With Bitmaps in Flex”. The feedback was tremendously positive; it makes me want to do it all over again! The presentation materials are available for download at:

http://ech.net/360flex2008/