De MonsterDebugger

I’m always looking for a nice debugger to use on the fly, the “De MonsterDebugger” looks really nice.

De MonsterDebugger is an open source debugger for Adobe Flash, Flex and AIR. De MonsterDebugger is made in Flex and AIR by design studio De Monsters.

One of the nicest features in my opinion is the live editing of properties, very handy when fiddling to position elements correctly.

Links:

wmode=”transparent”

I never knew/realised this, but it’s very useful to know:

The background of a Flash movie can be set to transparent. This allows the background color or image of the HTML page that contains the Flash movie to show through and allows the layering of Flash content with DHTML content.

Very useful when your Flash is on a layer in HTML that could be covered by something else when you’re scrolling the page.

Wmode not set:

Wmode not set

Wmode not set

Wmode set to “transparent”:

wmode set to transparent

wmode set to transparent

Source: Adobe TechNote

PS: Never mind the awesome (ahem) colours, this was just a quick test. 😉

Flex IRC Client

Just came across this when browsing around a bit. This Flex IRC client is a port of the Java-based PircBot.

Flex IRC Client aims to be a Flex / Flash based IRC Client. Currently most browser-based chat solutions are either proprietary or applets. Flex IRC Client wants to bring the power of IRC to the majority of the Internet-users without requiring a download or an install.

I know this client is still under development, but it could really do with a window showing some progress when connecting to a server. Also, a proxy of sorts would be nice since I get a lot of Security Errors when trying to connect to a server: “SecurityErrorEvent type=”securityError” bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text=”Error #2048: Security sandbox violation: http://ansuz.nl/toys/irc/FlexIRCClient.swf cannot load data from irc.efnet.nl:6667.””, probably due to no cross-domain policies being set on the IRC servers. Connecting works when running this locally 😉

Links

AS Frameworks

Recently I’ve been looking into different frameworks, just to get some experience with other interesting frameworks out there. I’ve compiled a list of some of the frameworks I’ve found. I’m sure I’ve missed a couple of other good ones, if you know of one, please let me know. 🙂

Gaia
A framework package as a Flash component. Handy for designers, but it kinda made me shrug… Though reading through the docs a couple of interesting features showed through, like the generation of the navigation through the context menu.
Link: http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/index.php

Cairngorm
Used this framework / micro architecture a lot already. Nice Event-Command pairs as well as delegates for calling all (web)services.
Link: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/cairngorm/Cairngorm

PureMVC
I’ve been working with a PureMVC project lately and looked at it before, quite similar in some ways to Cairngorm, just different names. 😉
A nice resource for pureMVC: http://puremvc.tv/
Link: http://puremvc.org/

Swiz

Swiz is a framework for Adobe Flex that aims to bring complete simplicity to RIA development. Swiz provides Inversion of Control, event handing, and simple life cycle for asynchronous remote methods.

Link: http://code.google.com/p/swizframework/

Dawn

Dawn is a lightweight framework for ActionScript inspired by Google Guice. In addition to Dependency Injection, it provides type safe notifications and helps you to build apps which are loosely coupled, easily unit tested, and less error-prone.

Link: http://wiki.github.com/sammyt/dawn

Mate

Mate is a tag-based, event-driven Flex framework.

Mate framework has been created to make it easy to handle the events your Flex application creates. Mate allows you to define who is handling those events, whether data needs to be retrieved from the server, or other events need to be triggered.

In addition, Mate provides a mechanism for dependency injection to make it easy for the different parts of your application to get the data and objects they need.

Link: http://mate.asfusion.com/

I think I’m going to give Dawn a try soon enough, of all the above it looks the most interesting to me.

Exclude files from Flex PMD

You can exclude files and/or packages from Flex PMD by creating your own rule set, use the “exclude-pattern” tag to exclude files.

  1. <ruleset name="myruleset"
  2. xmlns=...>
  3. <description>My ruleset</description>
  4. <exclude-pattern>.*/some/package/.*</exclude-pattern>
  5. <exclude-pattern>.*/some/other/package/FunkyClassNamePrefix.*</exclude-pattern>
  6. <include-pattern>.*/some/package/ButNotThisClass.*</include-pattern>
  7. <rule>...
  8. </ruleset>

Link: http://pmd.sourceforge.net/howtomakearuleset.html