This was one of the best presentations I saw at 360 flex. Straight to the point, technical enlightenment from the smartest guy in the room. If you don’t have a comfortable notion of Flex and data binding going in, this may scare you off the framework entirely. Just remember, data binding is not magic. Take note of the code that the Flex compiler is generating for you, and be aware of how much overhead is being added to your app every time you use it. You may already know this stuff, but Michael just has a great way of putting it all together for you.

Screencast: Diving in the Data Binding Waters with Michael Labriola

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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