Archive for September, 2008

Are You Using IntelliJ IDEA Flex Support?

Or am I one of the few people on the planet, who punishes myself with this half-baked support for flex that IntelliJ IDEA has, instead of just jumping the dreaded FlexBuilder ship, before I sink myself?
Okay, that was a bit harsh, it just seems to me, that there isn’t a day, without a new issue [...]

September 16, 2008  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Rich Internet Applications, Tools  22 Comments

Flash and Flex APIs Lack in Quality

Coming from long term Java programming, I can see that I have gotten used to very good api design. It is not, that JavaSE and JavaEE doesn’t have their corners of bad api design. But working with flash and flex, I seem to come across strange and bad api design a bit too often.
The other [...]

September 11, 2008  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Design, Programming  10 Comments

Are AS3 Number Variables Real Objects or Not?

I am confused. Is the Number class really a class, that I can create instances of and expect to have reference semantics etc. like the rest of the classes in ActionScript3?
Given this AS3 code:

var foo : Number = null;
trace("foo="+foo);

The compiler outputs a warning saying “null used where a Number value was expected“, but it does [...]

September 11, 2008  Tags: ,   Posted in: Programming  8 Comments

Mate – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Lately, the new Mate flex framework by asfusion has caused quite a stir in the flex community, as a contender to the established frameworks of Cairngorm and PureMVC. Most of the comments on Mate that I have seen has been quite positive, which I think is well deserved. Mate offers a new way of doing [...]

September 10, 2008  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Design, Programming, Rich Internet Applications  11 Comments