Sunday, April 13th, 2008
From time to time I re-read the introductory articles on Cairngorm just to remind me of why I don’t use it and never will. This installment of the Architectural Atrocities series is a critique of the Cairngorm framework, and the Model Locator pattern in particular.
Sunday, November 25th, 2007
The collections in Flex are good as data providers for list and tree components, doing the dirty work of making sure that the components know of changes made to the underlying data, but frankly they suck at most other things. Most importantly they suck at being collections. In this post I’m going to show you why and how to alleviate the problem somewhat.
Friday, March 16th, 2007
An object of type Number, int, uint and Boolean cannot contain null. You may find it obvious, but I find it weird and disturbing. Disturbing enough to include it in my series on architectural atrocities in ActionScript.
Saturday, December 30th, 2006
What does the classes Stage, Key, Mouse, Selection, ExternalInterface from the ActionScript 2.0 API:s have in common? They are bastadized singletons.
The really sad part is that of the five, three are still in the API:s in ActionScript 3.0 and of those Mouse and ExternalInterface are still bastardized singletons. Stage has been refactored completely and Key and Selection have been replaced or removed.
Saturday, July 29th, 2006
This is the fifth post in the Architectural Atrocities series and now the time has come to scrutinize ActionScript 3.0. The item of discussion is interfaces and how they are used in the ActionScript 3.0 API:s.
Let me start with an OO-maxim:
If you prefix your interfaces with “I”, you have no idea how to use them
Sunday, May 14th, 2006
In this the fourth post of my series Architectural Atrocities in ActionScript, I refer you to the blog post Raising Hell by Zwetan Kjukov, in which he explains the biggest atrocity of them all: ActionScript 2.0, the beast.
The main point is in a sidenote
ActionScript 2 is not a real class-based language, only it’s syntax is class-based
and that’s the kernel of the poodle, AS2 is weakening syntax sugar on top of a more powerful language, namely JavaScript.
Friday, February 10th, 2006
In programming, “side effects” refers to things that happen when you call a function or method, besides the returned value. For example, a method might change the UI, log a message or write to a database, and yet return a value at the same time.
Friday, February 10th, 2006
Today I wrote a filter tween component. In it self it wasn’t very hard, but ActionScript didn’t help very much. I never cease to be amazed over how bad the ActionScript API:s are (I have a feeling this is how most of my posts are going to start).
Take the filters property of the MovieClip class, you would expect the filter API, which came with Flash 8, to be modern and object oriented, but no. It’s a property, it’s an array that I have to manage by myself, and what’s more: it actually returns another array from the one I set.
Friday, February 10th, 2006
Introducing the first article in the series Architectural Atrocities in ActionScript. In this series I explore the inconsitencies, oddities and idiocies of the ActionScript API:s. It’s likely to become a long running series, as I don’t see any obvious limit other than the API itself. By the way, who is the architect behind the ActionScript API:s? If anyone knows, please tell me, and I will put him or her on the list of people never to hire.
In this first item on the infinite list, let’s explore the oddities of the BitmapData method applyFilter.