Change is afoot in the lands of Flash and Flex
Graham Odds, November 14th, 2011
Adobe has recently made a number of rather muddled announcements around Flash and Flex that have caused confusion and concern in the development community. In this post I hope to clarify what actually has been said and present my take on what it might actually mean for those of us on the receiving end. Adobe [...]
Static Initialisation in Flex
Graham Odds, July 29th, 2011
For reasons best ignored I recently investigated the different ways in which static initialisation code can be run in Flex. As well as a direct equivalent to the static initialiser blocks available in Java and C#, Flex has a couple of subtle variants that can prove useful in different circumstances. First up, the “standard” static [...]
Flex, Silverlight or HTML5? Time to decide…
Graham Odds, May 6th, 2011
Building on the experience and expertise within Scott Logic, my colleague, Colin Eberhardt, has produced an excellent whitepaper considering the three big web technologies at the moment: Flex, Silverlight and HTML5. Recent advances in web technologies have resulted in a complex landscape for application developers to navigate. Coupled with the recent boom in new platforms, [...]
White Paper: Flex, Silverlight or HTML5? Time to decide…
Colin Eberhardt, May 5th, 2011
When meeting current and prospective clients the subject of web technology choice often arises. There has been a great deal of confusion and uncertainty out there, even before Microsoft’s perceived change of stance with respect to Silverlight emerged. This white paper is intended to help technology decision makers come to an informed choice when faced [...]
Updating Flex Sparkline to Flex 4
Graham Odds, April 19th, 2011
In a previous post I presented a library of
Presentation Model (or MVVM) with Mate
Graham Odds, January 31st, 2011
This post introduces the Presentation Model (or MVVM) architectural pattern as one approach for creating “better” large-scale Flex applications and shows how the Mate Framework can be leveraged to not only achieve this pattern but increase separation of concerns above that of a “standard” Flex application. Background One of the great advantages Flex is that [...]
Flex Charts vs Silverlight Charts – a test of Performance
Graham Odds, November 16th, 2010
This post follows on from the comparison of two Silverlight chart libraries produced by my colleague, Colin Eberhardt, by adding an implementation of the simple image processing tool in Flex using the Flex Charting library to the comparison. The results show that the Flex Charts perform easily as well as the Visiblox charts without the [...]
Logging to Server from Flex
Graham Odds, August 6th, 2010
An issue that can crop up with Flex applications is the lack of any log information to match up against users’ bug reports. It is possible to configure the debug version of Flash Player to record trace() output, but most users do not have this setup. Additionally, it is much more desirable to maintain this [...]
Flex Sparkline
Graham Odds, February 8th, 2010
Sparklines are described by their inventor, Edward Tufte, as “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics”. They are an ideal tool for displaying trends for single entries within large data sets, for example, stock prices. As well as the standard miniature line series, Tufte’s original specification introduces a ternary sparkline, a.k.a. win-loss sparkline, where small columns are used [...]
Silverlight 4 beta released leaving Flex behind
Colin Eberhardt, November 19th, 2009
This post looks at the speed of development of the two leading RIA frameworks, Silverlight and Flex, giving unequivocal proof that Silverlight is better than Flex … ! This week at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), there…