I was complaining to someone the other day about how most text editors fail to deal with large files. I was trying to edit a 8mb sql file and my default editors eclipse and cream (a vim extension) both couldn’t handle it. I then tried emacs and jEdit neither of which I particularly like. jEdit at least opened the file. But the interface is clunky and on my system at least, wont go past 800×600 screen real estate….

In the end I made all the text edits to the sql file using sed which is a handy (and quick) command line tool. But I was still disturbed….

Anyway, I read a blog post somewhere that said scribes was the go. So I installed it and gave it a whirl on my latest sql file which was 38mb.

It took a few seconds to open, but it DID open and the first thing you notice is that (for gnome users at least) it looks like a gnome editor (unlike jEdit which screams “I was made in the 90’s in java“).

The template system is also very cool. It reminds me a little of swanky Mac people and their TextMate. Rather than me trying to describe it go here and look at the example video. Which also shows the bookmark feature which is cool. Check out its other features here. Oh and its open source too…of course.

ASForms is a very lightweight Actionscript component set. They are basically very similar to forms in HTML, but done in flash. (You know, radio buttons, checkboxes – that kind of thing). This release is fairly stable yet lacks accessibility and the button class which I’m still tweaking. The code examples give a basic indication of how it all works and I’ll make an effort to fill in some of the commenting holes over the next couple of weeks.

The code is released under the GPL MIT and was developed with MTASC strict in a AMES dev environment.  

Check it out here.

technorati tags: Flash, ASForms, Components

After swapping to an open Source flash solution for a RIA, the following advantages were achieved:

• saved over 110 working hours in compile time (that’s crazy stuff!!!)
• integrated into the overall dotnet web application a million times better
• less bugs, tighter code, better code
• better development environment

technorati tags: Flash, FAMES, AMES, Open source

Last year I was working for the Trading Post with a group of five flash developers. The Trading Post is similar to ebay in design but has the bonus of reproducing its ads in print around Australia (The print version is very popular). In other words, when you place an ad on Trading Post you can choose whether it goes online only or online and in the Trading Post print versions.

We were rebuilding a flash application that allowed people to create ads. The flash RIA was called PlaceAd and was a small part of the whole Trading Post rebuild. The rest of the website was also being recoded (C# dotnet). The dotnet team were using NANT (a dotnet version of ant) to build their application and because of the nature of the Flash IDE we were providing pre-compiled swfs for the build. This meant that the build never truly represented the latest flash codebase. It also created an annoying task for us in the flash team to keep on top of what swf was in the build process. Basically in a fully automated process, Flash was the only thing not automated.

The Flash team was full of some very competent people including Dan Webb (that suckerfish guy), Dave Rosen (that xhtmlised guy), David Wyss (a very cluey java programmer) and Nivantha (UI king). We started developing the application with the Flash IDE as normal. However, about a month into the project, the lead flash programmer left and I was put in his place.

The first thing I did as lead programmer was provide a use case for swapping to the FAMES open source flash development environment. (Note: Don’t use FAMES anymore, use AMES). It took one whole day to convert the code base over into the new environment. However the bulk of this work was fixing bugs which the Flash IDE didn’t seem to worry about. MTASC wasn’t as forgiving . I was confident that using FAMES would save us time and that by using MTASC we would get cleaner code however the big selling point was that we could now integrate PlaceAd into the automatic NANT builds. This meant that when the NANT build was run it would grab the latest flash class files and compile them with MTASC as part of the build. It felt a bit like all of a sudden Flash was now a serious development tool. (Email me for a copy of the NANT files to build swfs.)

So, after convincing management we got the go ahead to install Eclipse and FAMES on the development machines. The other Flash devs were a little wary about such a rash move but when they first compiled the PlaceAd swf in FAMES they were instantly converted. PlaceAd is a big app with lots of classes and business logic. With the Flash IDE it took approximately 20 seconds to compile (on beefy machines). With MTASC it took two seconds!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What does this convert to?:

Four developers, 90 classes, 26 weeks, five days a week, eight hours a day, five times an hour = PlaceAd is compiled 20,800 times (approximately).

At 20 seconds per compile that equals 115 hours waiting with the Flash IDE.

At 2 seconds per compile that equals 11 hours with FAMES.

104 hours saved (That’s over two and a half working weeks).

Apart from the gigantic savings in speed, using FAMES provided a better, more stable PlaceAd. MTASC enforces better code logic and is critical of ambiguous code. The logging provided with FAMES is far superior to the Flash IDE. We were able to tag traces as Error, Fatal, Info etc. This makes debugging a huge application with five developers a hell of a lot easier. And of course using Eclipse is far better than using the Flash IDE (but that wouldn’t be hard). The compare function in Eclipse is so useful when developing in a team environment. We were able to compare a class file against local versions, checked in versions, older versions in SourceSafe to quickly identify what code had changed.

One of the requirements for PlaceAd was to adhere to fairly strict code guidelines. Dave the java guru hacked JavaDoc to make a application that would parse every line of code in every class and made a note if it did not meet coding guidelines. It even provided a ranking system so we could see which class (and class author) was the worst offending. It also checked to see if a function was being used and if it wasn’t it was commented as such and a report made so we could trim the unused classes where necessary. Of course it also provided a complete overview (in html) of the RIA in AsDoc style. Again – all of this was WITHIN the development environment, Eclipse.
Although I have moved on from Trading Post (It was a contract job) they are still using OS Flash and have smartly switched to Subversion instead of SourceSafe. For those Flash developers still toying with the Flash IDE, you really need to consider switching. Its such a superior and professional way to program Flash that once you try it out over an extended period of time you will never go back. Having said that, I would differentiate between Flash programmers and Flash animators at this point. Animators should probably stick with the Flash IDE. To learn more about Open Source Flash check out http://osflash.org/

Notes:

PlaceAd is alive and functioning. Check it out by going here: http://www.tradingpost.com.au/ and clicking on the PlaceAd link. NOTE: because of some dodgy javascript code, it seems that the only way to access PlaceAd from firefox is by following this method: (I no longer work at tradingpost and neither myself or the flash team are responsible for such dodginess )

1. Go to https://www.tradingpost.com.au/MyTradingPost/MyTradingPost.aspx
2. Click on PlaceAd

I did not have influence over the interface design for PlaceAd. I find that its not intuitive and that a richer user experience could have been included.

PlaceAd was developed last year. FAMES is no longer the best option for Flash development. Instead I use and encourage other Flash developers to use AMES.

One of the biggest headaches with PlaceAd was using the Macromedia components. They are buggy and bloated. There is a list of open source components here and I have recently created some open source components as well which are very lightweight and skinnable (here).

• The presentation swf – made from OS Flash of course (AMES). You will need to click on the swf to make it active, then use left, right arrows to navigate (or spacebar).
• The code that made the swf, raw and loosely commented (I was in a rush back then )

technorati tags: Open source, flash

The project was basically a online registration form- the app had to capture data, process some of it then post it to a server. For something like this a full blown component framework was overkill. And because of the older userbase the components had to look very similar to existing html components so that there would be no confusion (hopefully ).

My requirements were:

- they had to look like established user interface components (a radio button had to look like a html radio button).

- they had to be very small in size (anything over 40k was way too big)

- they had to be as fast as using a browsers components (that is, they draw with no lag whatsoever)

- they needed to be skinnable (in regards to colours and size mainly)

- they had to respond to events and be easily redrawn

Although all of the open source flash alternatives were of a high quality they just didn’t quite fit my requirements.

So, I set about creating my own. Below you will find an example of what I have temporarily called As Forms (until I can think of a snappier name).

They are small in size – the movie below is only 12k.
Its super simple to change the colours, size and fonts. However changing the shape requires getting your hands dirty in the core code. For example if you dont like the arrow in the combobox then you will need to edit the draw code for it.
They are really snappy which I’m really happy with. The reason I think they are snappy is because of the hard coded shapes. By limiting how much you can change, you gain speed improvements. They are also quite independent in terms of kb size. For example the movie below with all components in it is 12k, a movie with only the radio buttons is 4k. With macromedia just the radio buttons comes in at 90k last time I tried

These components are designed for people who just want quick and easy components – rather than the more full blown one. Over the coming week I will tidy up the code and release it under the GPL. They are already being used in production without any issues, but I’d hate to release something without tidying up my abusive comments in code
Here is an example of the flash forms. When you click the submit button (which isn’t apart of AS Forms) it will email me your response

[kml_flashembed movie="/flashForms/FormExamples.swf" height="650" width="333" /]

technorati tags: flash components, open source, flash