2010-12-28

Studying Parsley Framework

I've been building this pretty big application at work, its the main application we use to manage all of our internal accounts. The application has been in construction for 2 years now, its all done in Flex and Java and on the Flex side of things, I've been using Cairngorm as my application framework. However as we've being adding different parts (some are not often used) the application has gotten bigger and I've been looking to break things up into modules to help manage everything. Both from a run-time perspective (memory consumption) and from a development perspective (maintenance).

Of course using modules got me to thinking about how everything would work with Cairngorm, so I started doing some research and came across the Parsley application framework. Parsley is an Inversion-of-control (IOC) framework much like Spring is in the Java programming world. Meaning you have a config file that describes all the objects you want framework to manage for you and then it injects the appropriate object(s) into other object(s) for you, so no one object knows about the other. This makes your code loosely coupled, easier to update and maintain and finally, easy to unit test.

The framework appears to be well designed and like I just mentioned, reminds me of Spring, so the concepts are easy to understand. Also, it seems that parts of the latest Cairngorm (version 3.0) can be used along with it, so this will help as well. And the biggest point is that it has build in support for working with Flex modules, so I am eager to use it.

I'll be writting some blog posts of my experiences with Parsley, so look for them soon!

2010-12-05

Installing Flash Builder Burrito as a plug-in

If you are like me and develop in Java and Flex all day long and Eclipse is your IDE, then most likely you will want to install Flash Builder as a plug-in within Eclipse. Well I just installed the beta version of Flash Builder codenamed "Burrito" and noticed it was installed as a standalone application. After a quick Google search I found the following article, which allowed me to install Burrito as a plug-in within Eclipse in a matter of seconds.

So here is what I did exactly (cause I upgraded my Eclipse version as well):
  1. Uninstall previous version of Flash Builder 4
  2. Deleted my eclipse installation (d:\opt\eclipse)
  3. Downloaded and installed latest version of Eclipse
  4. Installed Flash Player "Burrito" and then followed the instructions here

2010-12-02

Flash Player 10.2 beta is out

The beta version of the next iteration of the Flash Player, version 10.2 is now available for download on Adobe Labs. The biggest new feature is related to using hardware acceleration to improve performance. So if you do lots of video/animation using the Flash Player, what are you waiting for? go over to the labs website and get it!

Here is a another website with some pretty good info on this release.

Flash one of big selling points for Android

Just saw a commercial for a Videotron Nexus One (Videotron is a cell phone provider here in Montreal) and of the main points was the fact that it ran Flash. Love it. Well how else will I see ads, watch YouTube videos, view sport highlights on ESPN.com and TSN.ca and see news articles on CNN.com? Flash is a big part of the web experience.