Posts about ‘AIR’
Mar
4Scaling up EasyMVC as your Flex application grows (Part 2: Services)
4
Posted: 4th March 2008
Tags: ActionScript, AIR, as3, easymvc, Flex, RIAs
Posted in AIR, Flex, as3
Comments: 4 Comments »
EasyMVC is a lightweight architecture process for Adobe Flex and AIR first proposed by Tom Bray of SearchCoders and Chatopica. This is the second part covering Service calls, of a two part article on how to take that architecture and scale up to a simplified cairngorm style architecture when you outgrown EasyMVC.
Click here to read an introduction on EasyMVC
Click here to read Scaling up EasyMVC part 1.
Firstly I would like to add some clarification as to the motivation for these articles. I have had a few emails asking what the point of these articles are as I am just recreating Cairngorm. I hope these articles will satisfy two goals. Firstly having discussed EasyMVC and evangelised about it a little I feel I should offer a way to scale this up when your application grows, if not you could end up with a huge EasyMVC controller class that has 30 or so event handlers in addition to service calls etc which will get unmanageable, especially in a team of developers. Secondly I hope these articles will give an insight into how Cairngorm works from a simplified perspective. Cairngorm is an excellent architecture but it is intimidating for beginners and intermediates alike. This Scaled up EasyMVC architecture provides a simplified lightweight version of Cairngorm and also provides an upgrade path for EasyMVC adopters.
In the first article we looked at how we can borrow the command design pattern (as used in Cairngorm) to split out our centralised event handlers into separate classes or commands. Firstly this makes your code more organised and easier to locate specific functionality when you application grows but also provides you with the basis for the next step in handling remote calls to web services, be that SOAP, REST or AMF services.
Read the rest of this article »
Jan
29Adobe Flex: Styling the DataGrid header separators
29
Posted: 29th January 2008
Posted in AIR, Flex, as3
Comments: 4 Comments »
Although the default alo theme in Flex can be easily styled through CSS (made especially easy using the Flex Style Explorer), there are elements such as separators between the column headers that cannot easily be styled. As the Halo skin for such elements are overridable, we can use the following solution to change their colour or remove them altogether.
By default Flex places two vertical, 1 pixel wide lines between each column header on a data grid (1 line white with a 50% transparency, the other the border colour). However in some instances this style does not look right, espeically if you are trying to create a dark charcol grey theme, the white vertical line stands out too much, or you don’t want any separators.
We could override this functionality by creating a 1×1px transaparent .png and use that as the skin, but I am going to show you how we can create programmatic skin to get rid of a UI skin such as this, that we can then take a step further and customise into our own CSS stylable skin.
Read the rest of this article »
