Flex Spinning Progress Indicator Component

Sometimes you need to indicate progress to users when the application is doing something, like calling a remote web-service or something. At times, it can be nice to incorporate this as an element in the UI, that operates in an unobtrusive way. For instance showing a small indicator on or besides the button, that initiated [...]

October 28, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: Programming, Rich Internet Applications  6 Comments

Flex Data Bindings – Behind The Scenes

Ever wondered how flex data bindings actually work behind the scenes? I have, and sometimes I have had troubles with it, that made me wish I knew some more. This post is a writeup of the knowledge about flex data bindings I uncovered, when looking into the mxmlc generated code for bindings.
Vanilla Example
Here is a [...]

October 12, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Programming, Rich Internet Applications  One Comment

IDEAs Deep Flex-Mojos Support

If you are writing Flex applications using IntelliJ IDEA, you should also choose the Flexmojos maven plugin for building (if you build with maven, that is) and not the other alternatives. Why? Well, for once, it seems to be the best plugin around for flex building, but also because IDEA has deep support for it.
Currently, [...]

August 20, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Tools  No Comments

Flex DataGrid and Image as ItemRenderer

Just a quick note or advice.
When using the Image component as a drop-in item renderer in a Flex DataGrid, there are things to remember or know about sizing. You can give the individual columns a width setting of their own, but the row height is a little different:

either (a) set rowHeight of the grid, which [...]

April 27, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: Rich Internet Applications  One Comment

IDEA Is Back to Being Great!

Some time ago, I got frustrated with working with IDEA flex support. I had some complaints about the quality of the flex support in IDEA7 and 8, and I let the steam come out in that blog entry.
Well, just to be fair, I thought I would post a short blog entry about how things have [...]

April 4, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Tools  3 Comments

Problem Adding Flex SDK in IDEA

…on a Mac or Linux.
I downloaded the latest Flex SDK from Adobe and simply unzipped the files in a directory on disk. I then entered module settings in IntelliJ IDEA and tried adding a new Flex SDK, simply by pointing IDEA at the unzipped directory. But, IDEA complained that “the selected directory is not a [...]

January 30, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Tools, Uncategorized  No Comments

Flex-Mojos keepAs3Metadatas Option to Apply keep-as3-metadata Compiler Option

If you use the flex-mojos plugin to compile flex code in a maven project, you might have the need to apply the -compiler.keep-as3-metadata option to the compiler, like I did.
The documentation for compile-swf mojo says to put something like the following, into the configuration element:

<keepAs3Metadatas>
<metadata>Bindable</metadata>
<metadata>Events</metadata>
</keepAs3Metadatas>

but that failed horribly. It [...]

December 29, 2008  Tags: ,   Posted in: Rich Internet Applications  No Comments

Docked ApplicationControlBar Is Not In Children List

Here is a funny thing about how ApplicationControlBar acts differently as a child when docked and not docked.
I had to write some code that traverse the complete tree of components in a flex application, and that was when I first discovered about rawChildren lists. It turns out, that not all components are added as children [...]

December 29, 2008  Tags:   Posted in: Programming, Rich Internet Applications  No Comments

Resizing Flex Dialog to Flash Dimensions

Not long ago, we had created a flex dialog with fixed width and height, which gave users with less screen resolution a real problem. The dialog was opening with the titlebar and close buttons outside the screen. Hence, the dialog couldn’t be closed and it couldn’t be moved.
Here is how to make the dialog resize [...]

December 1, 2008  Tags: ,   Posted in: Programming, Rich Internet Applications  2 Comments

4 Things To Hate About PureMVC

Previously, I have written about how puremvc takes a stand on patterns of gui architecture while Cairngorm does not. I have also proclaimed to colleagues, that I do not find puremvc especially great, but at the same time find it “good enough”, which is to be understood as: The current contenders are (were?) not any [...]

October 5, 2008  Tags: ,   Posted in: Design, Programming, Rich Internet Applications  20 Comments