It just so happens that I’m speaking tonight to the FlashPDX user group here in Portland. I’ll be presenting my app template, and I just realized that I’ve never actually blogged about the latest version.

My app template is a relatively light-weight MVC implementation that is very similar to Cairngorm. But, my framework works equally well in Flash applications as it does in Flex.

If you’re interested in my MVC framework, check out this
mailing list post, or jump straight to the download:
bumpslide_apptemplate_mvc_20090524.zip

If you’d like to hear more about it, you can see me present in person tonight (Friday, June 26) at 7pm PDT (doors open 6:30) at Fashionbuddha Studio, 123 NW 2nd Ave. Suite 206, Portland, OR 97209.

We’ll also be broadcasting via a Connect session. So, login around 7pm west coast time.
http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/flashpdx

See you tonight.

I have been refactoring my service loading application code recently, and I am moving away from my URLLoaderQueue in favor of classes that represent individual requests. After doing a few Flex projects, I really like the IResponder interface, and when using that in conjunction with the Command pattern, it just makes sense to have a URL request implementation that can use this responder interface. Much of this code is inspired by code in the Flex framework, but note that there are no Flex dependencies here. This code is designed for those that like the idea of IResponder and the Flex service classes but don’t want to get bogged down in the Flex.

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There’s been a lot of talk about the potential dead end that is EcmaScript 4. This whole thing seems rather rediculous to me. Your tool of choice will most likely not disappear overnight. And, hell, even if namespaces did disappear from AS3, I might not miss it. When I first heard about this, I thought, hey, this might be a good time to start using haxe. See, haxe looks a lot like AS3, and it compiles down to various SWF versions as well as Javascript, and now even PHP. If I need to write a javascript library, using haxe lets me work with a smarter language and compiler and still support all major browsers. I was curious what Nicolas Cannasse thought of all this, and sure enough he has a blog post about this very topic, except he wrote it 9 months ago.

http://blog.haxe.org/entry/25

Update: he has posted a more timely analysis as well…

http://ncannasse.free.fr/?p=82

The AS3 version of ModestMaps has finally been released. ModestMaps for AS3 allows you to create maps in Flash that load tiles from Google Maps, Yahoo, Virtual Earth or other custom tile providers. I used this library recently to build Platial’s new Frappr widget.

This release includes some changes that I contributed to the project including a new approach to marker event management. There is also a new Flash CS3 sample I created to demonstrate these changes.

Download the tarball or checkout directly from SVN.

Just a reminder. I will be presenting a session on the PureMVC framework for ActionScript this Tuesday as part of the Goto+Play speaker series.

PureMVC is a lightweight framework for creating applications in ActionScript 3 (Flash and Flex), based upon the classic Model-View-Controller design meta-pattern. This presentation will provide an overview of PureMVC as well as a look at current best practices for day-to-day development as we walk through a sample application built with Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3.

Introduction to PureMVC
presented by David Knape, http://bumpslide.com/

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
doors open at 6, meeting at 6:30
(Old Town Pizza to follow?)

Fashionbuddha Studio
123 NW 2nd Ave, Suite 206
Portland, OR 97209
T: 503-490-4787

More info at gotoandplay.net

Update: Demo, source, and slides now available here. Also, the Acrobat Connect recording can be found here.