We’re working on a documentation generator for ActionScript 2 that parses code commented with the JavaDoc style syntax to create HTML help, Flash help, or any other type of documentation. Here’s a sneak peak at the output and feature list…
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Christophe Coenraets posted an entry on his blog demonstrating four different techniques to write a simple temperature converter application.
The purpose of the entry was specifically to demonstrate four different ways to accomplish the same thing–showing how flexible Flex really is. The goal for this application was to separate the ActionScript out of the MXML files.
I’d like to follow up on this entry and demonstrate a fifth approach. This is something one of the Flex engineers proposed earlier and in my opinion is the cleanest method. Instead of using an <mx:Script> tag and including functions that get dropped into the current class, we can create a Controller class and link it through tags. This keeps tags in MXML, ActionScript in external files, promotes OOP programming, and simplifies reuse.
Many ColdFusion applications can benefit from Office integration–in fact many of our clients flat out require that we support Office integration. In Integrating ColdFusion with Microsoft Office I review six different options and demonstrate the pros and cons of each. You’ll learn when and why to integrate with Office and which options are best for a given situation.
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I wrote a DisplayInColumns custom tag recently for a project and have found it to be extremely useful. The tag minimally accepts as parameters a query and a formatter and optionally includes the number of columns and table attributes. The formatter is a UDF that is called to format each record in the query–referred to as a callback.
In response to a support request for our charting components I was looking into how a v1 component utilizes a v2 data source, such as the results from a WebServiceConnector. In stepping through the code, I noticed something surprising: the XML returned from the web service is deserialized on an as-needed basis instead of all at once. In the XML world this is called “lazy deserialization” and it’s a big feature I’ve never heard anyone mention as related to Flash MX 2004.
Curious? Here’s how it works…
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