Topic: Sites to remember

Back in November 2005 (yes, 2.5 years ago!) I wrote an article about how data types and type checking work in ActionScript. ActionScript is different than many languages, in that the ActionScript compiler can be used for compile-time type checking (or not), and at runtime it is a strongly typed language, but it also has features of dynamically typed languages. This allows for some flexibility but also means that you have to be careful about testing your code (because the compiler won’t always catch everything).

My conclusion (not original by any means) was that unit testing is an important tool for ActionScript developers. I’ve tried a couple of ActionScript unit testing frameworks (ASUnit and FlexUnit). And finally getting to the point of this post, I was interested to learn today that the crew at Digital Primates is releasing an open source unit testing framework for Flex, known as “dpunit”.

(via Jesse Warden via Twitter)

A couple of months ago at a SilvaFUG meeting I saw a demo of some graph visualization libraries — the kind of thing you use to create a graph showing nodes linked together according to various relationships.

The current “favorite” is the Flex Visual Graph Library (FVGL) Open Source Project.

Their Visual Graph explorer sample gives a nice overview of the functionality that’s available.

Anyway, I forgot to note this earlier, so I’m adding it now, though there’s a good chance this isn’t news to anyone who’s interested in this sort of thing.

(via email from Ted Patrick)

A co-worker and friend of mine, Francis Cheng, recently started a new blog that I wanted to share:

http://blogs.adobe.com/fcheng/

Francis is a former engineer on the Flash Authoring team (and before that, a lawyer). He’s been in his current position on the ActionScript documentation team for several years. He’s also one of Adobe’s representatives on the ECMAScript language committee, so he’s got a better idea than anyone else I know of the internals and future of the core ActionScript language.

So far his posts have been really great if, like me, you’re interested in knowing more about the less-used features of ActionScript and also getting an early look at new features that will probably be in future versions of ActionScript.

I just got a heads-up about a nice visualization component for Flex that draws links between a set of items. I’ve got an idea in mind which could use something like that, so it was nice and timely for me. So thanks, Mark Shepherd, Adobe Flex Builder engineer, for the component (and thanks to Bob Flynn, manager of the IUMMUG, for pointing it out to me).

If you’re interested in building large-scale Flex apps and not sure where to start, Brian Riggs has a nice article on Architecting a Flex App, where he gives a good overview and introduction to structuring an application using the Model-View-Controller pattern, as implemented in the Cairngorm framework.

Brian is one of two (at least so far, maybe there are more) authors writing on the Adobe Kiwi Project blog. The Kiwi Project (as stated in the tagline of the site) is a project which is working on creating “Read/Write Web Components for Flex.” I’m not sure of the details of what that means, but parts of it can be seen in the open-source NoteTag note-taking application which Brian uses as his example in this and other articles, and which is available on the Adobe Labs site.

Darrick Brown, who also writes on the site, has put up a couple of nice articles on ActionScript 3 from a C/C++ perspective. I don’t know either of those languages, although I work a lot in C# so I understood all his examples just fine. In any case he’s got what I think are some nice examples and thoughts for someone coming from any modern language.

If you bother to read this set of links, maybe you can guess what my newest potential side project is…

(Hint: JSON is a more-terse-than-XML format for serializing data (e.g. to transfer over networks). It’s still not as terse as AMF (which is a binary format), but there’s a good JSON-RPC service available for .NET, unlike for AMF, and it’s better than XML-RPC, which I already wrote an ActionScript client for. Oh, and Adobe just released an open-source JSON library for ActionScript 3, authored by Darron Schall, so it would seem that half the work is already done…)

ServiceCapture is a commercial tool for viewing HTTP traffic, particularly specialized for AMF. I haven’t taken it for a spin myself, but it received strong recommendations on the OSFlash (Open Source Flash) list from such notables as Aral Balkan.

FlashPluginSwitcher is a handy (free) little tool for testing .swf files in different versions of the Flash Player. (via Ted Patrick)

I almost forgot to mention this site, which is what led me to find the Interaction Design Patterns repository I linked to earlier today:

VisDoc looks to be a fantastic AS2 documentation generator at least from the screenshots and the sample documentation (including full docs on the built-in ActionScript classes) . It’s OS X only, which will prevent me from becoming a customer, but I’ll probably try it out on my Mac at work just to make myself wish…

I can’t decide if I agree about the choice to call these design patterns, but in any case here is a nice (albeit small) collection of solutions to common interaction design needs. Be sure not to miss the section on Interaction Design Literature and Sites, which has links to the big names plus some hidden gems.

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