Articles

by Chet Haase, July 7, 2010 Submit comment
With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase shows how Flex 4 enables a new, declarative model of drawing custom graphics objects in Flex code.
by Sean Landis, July 1, 2010 35 messages
Sean Landis, author of Agile Hiring, describes why he thinks hiring should be considered a core competence of software organizations and an important skill for software professionals.
by Chet Haase, June 21, 2010 Submit comment
With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase shows how to automate changes in property values when an application changes state.
by Frank Sommers, May 7, 2010 Submit comment
Last month, Adobe released both the latest version of the open-source Flex SDK and its payware, Eclipse-based Flex development tool, Flash Builder. Many new features in Flex and Flash Builder are aimed to increase Flex developers' productivity. This article reviews the most important new Flash Builder productivity boosters.
by Chet Haase, April 23, 2010 Submit comment
With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase shows how to make components visible only in specified application states in Flex 4.
by Chet Haase, April 12, 2010 Submit comment
With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase explains pixel shaders in Flex 4, which allow you to provide arbitrary calculations on images at the pixel level.
by Frank Sommers, January 25, 2010 Submit comment
Adobe's Flash Player provides a sophisticated platform for client-side imaging applications. This article illustrates how to use the latest Flash Player 10 features from Flex 4 applications to efficiently manipulate images on the client, focusing on Pixel Bender image filters.
by Victor Szalvay, January 6, 2010 2 messages
An increasing number of organizations are taking the plunge to Scrum, with or without professional coaching. Developers transitioning to Scrum can avoid many pitfalls by following a handful of hard-learned principles. In this article, I discuss a common mistake with the popular "user story" requirements format: poorly defined done criteria.
by Frank Sommers, November 10, 2009 Submit comment
Flex 4 introduces a new API to define effects for rich-client applications. This article provides an overview of new features in Flex 4's effects and animation-related APIs.
by Bill Venners, September 30, 2009 6 messages
This article describes a Scala design pattern in which traits provide stackable modifications to underlying core classes or traits.
by Bill Venners, September 21, 2009 46 messages
In this interview, Clojure creator Rich Hickey suggests that the problems people associate with shared state are problems of time. He compares the lack of automatic time management in today's mainstream languages to the lack of automatic memory management in languages such as C++.
by Frank Sommers, September 16, 2009 3 messages
Flex 4's new syntax simplifies working with application states. This article provides a tutorial introduction into UI state management with Flex 4, and includes a complete example.
by Bill Venners, September 4, 2009 4 messages
This article describes a simple Scala design pattern that allows library designers to provide services that their clients can access either through mixins or imports. Giving users a choice between mixin composition and importing makes a library easier to use.
by Frank Sommers, September 1, 2009 1 message
An important feature in Flex 4 is a new component architecture, Spark, that allows a complete separation of a component's view from its display logic. This article provides a tutorial introduction to creating custom Flex 4 skins using the Spark architecture.
by Frank Sommers, August 11, 2009 2 messages
Allowing developers and designers to work together on the same Flex project is a key theme of the open-source Flex 4 SDK. An important enabler of designer-developer workflow in Flex 4 is a new component architecture, Spark, that separates the visual elements of a Flex component from other component logic. This article describes the basic principles of the Spark architecture, and how Spark makes it easier for developers and designers to work together.