James Echmalian

First, about the venue. The CNN Center in downtown Atlanta is an enormous indoor plaza enclosed by towers, steel girders and glass. The Omni Hotel occupies some of those towers. The conference is held in the Atrium, a courtyard that lies between the Omni towers. It occurs to me that I could observe the keynote proceedings from the balcony of my hotel room on the 11th floor of the South Tower. This calls a David Bowie lyric to mind: “I’m up on the 11st floor and I’m watching the cruisers below.” But I join the rest of the conference-goers downstairs instead. Read the rest of this entry »

“Bitmaps In Flex” is the presentation I’ll be delivering at the 360|Flex conference in Atlanta next week.

“Bitmaps In Flex” is about using some advanced ActionScript APIs to achieve visual effects in a Flex application that are both useful and cool. It assumes the audience is familiar with the the basic use of the Flex Image component and the use of bitmaps in styling, and goes a step beyond, by exploring the ActionScript Bitmap API and its application in Flex. The material to be presented is essential to developing an application that is about imagery: illustration, data visualization, medical imagery, scientific imagery, and so forth. The material also points the way to enhancing the visual impact of any application, by accessing effects that don’t come right out of the Flex box.

This talk dives deep into the Bitmap API, showing what can be accomplished and how. It swoops over best practices for creating custom Flex components, as related to bitmaps. It stops briefly at several sample mini-applications along the way. If you’re a “show me the code” type, you’ll be happy to know that the composition of the presentation is 60% code review, 40% slides.

I’ve expanded the Property Patterns Flex sample located here to include two more code templates. Both new templates demonstrate ways to define a bindable Flex property whose value is derived from that of another property of the same class. I’m finding this copy-paste-edit template approach to Flex best practices useful as I prepare for next week’s 360|Flex conference. Take a look at the source code (by right-clicking on the app) to see what I’m talking about.

You’re a Flex 2.0 programmer and wish to define an instance property of some class. You wish this property to be bindable, because it’s displayed. You also wish it to be read-only, for encapsulation. The property is variable, but the application code is not permitted to modify it directly. (Presumably, there are functions of the class that modify the value internally.) This is a recurring question, and the answer is not straightforward. I have been asked about this more than once by colleagues here at Allurent. A cookbook solution is called for. Here it is. Read the rest of this entry »