I was talking to my parents on the phone last Sunday as I do most Sundays, and my dad said that he had never read my blog until just a few days ago. He was impressed, he said, because he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. “It’s like another language from another planet.” Granted, the things I often write about are usually the most arcane and technical things I do. But, I think it’s time to bring it down a notch and write about the simple things that make writing code for Flash more enjoyable. For me, one of the nicest is data binding. This post is an introduction to the concept of storing application state in a Model Locator and using my BindableModel as a way to bind that data to view components.

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For a recent project I needed to create 2D barcodes on printouts as a way of encoding a large batch of data. I settled on the PDF417 barcode format since it was well-known and unencumbered by licensing restrictions. This is the same format used on the back of many drivers licenses. There are numerous commercial libraries and barcode fonts on the market, but there was nothing that supported AS3 out of the box. After some research, I decided to port an open-source java library (pdf417lib by Paulo Soares) to AS3. This is the result of those efforts.

Source Code: pdf417lib_as3_src_20080730.zip

Online Demo: PDF417 Barcode Generator
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