Richard Willis

Robotlegs is an AS3 dependency injection micro-framework.

Signals is a new approach for AS3 events, inspired by C# events and signals/slots in Qt.

Put them together and you’ve got an elegant, simple & completely decoupled solution to the problem of Flex & AIR development.

I’ve thrown together a really quick example (which you can download below) based upon a couple of things I’ve seen recently; firstly Richard Lord’s framework comparison talk at FlashBrighton a couple of weeks ago, and secondly, Owen Bennett’s  blend of RobotLegs and Signals he showed me last week. Seeing what Owen had put together inspired me to have a go myself. I wondered whether it was possible to create a RobotLegs/Signals hybrid that was even more decoupled than the system Owen was working on. So I created a short (less then 100 lines) class called ‘SignalBox’, named after a similarly named class in Owen’s system.

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Spurred on by this page on Kristen Akermans’s site and this blog post on Matt Pearson’s blog - which both list freelancers available in Brighton and which both link kindly to me - I decided I should return the favour. So what follows is a list of those people I recommend if you’re looking for a freelancer. Obviously I top my own list - I’ll be wanting the work first, thank you :) - but if I’m busy I thorougly recommend the other guys and gals (listed alphabetically) here:

Designers

Charis Mystakidou: wiredportfolio.com
Kristen Akerman: sting.co.uk
Luke Hornsby: flamingpixels.co.uk
Tim Frost: bullandgate.com

Developers

Richard Willis: richtextformat.co.uk
Matt Pearson: actionscripter.co.uk
Matt Sayers: soplausable.com
Neil Manuell: revisual.co.uk
Nikos Chagialas: devgallery.com
Owen Bennett: steamboy.co.uk

One of the projects I worked upon over the summer was destined for the South-American market and therefore needed to display in both Spanish and Portuguese. It was a microsite built in Flex and needed the capacity to alternate between these two languages at any given time. From the user’s perspective, a single button click should be sufficient to translate the entire site’s text from one language to another instantly. Looking around the web I couldn’t find any answers so I sat down and worked out a solution myself.

Here’s a sample app using English and my second language Swedish:

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I love the tools I work with but if I’m being honest, some things just don’t measure up. CSS in Flex for instance: it doesn’t do half the things a genuine CSS implementation should do. Thanks go to Tom Kennett for bringing to our attention this great blogpost about just how far short of the mark Flex’s CSS support falls.

One of the most irritating aspects is the fact that the ‘width’, ‘height’, ‘percentWidth’ and percentHeight’ properties of UIComponent - which is the base class for all visual components - are exactly that: properties, not styles. That means they can’t go into the CSS, they have to be added to the mxml tags themselves:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application 
  xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
  <mx:VBox width="100%">
    <mx:HBox id="header" width="100%" height="80" />
    <mx:HBox id="content" width="100%" height="100%" />
    <mx:HBox id="footer" width="100%" height="50" />
  </mx:VBox>
</mx:Application>

Even in an unrealistically small file like this, the ‘width’ and ‘height’ attributes make it difficult to read. When working with actual, lengthy .mxml files, a bit of simple editing can become like hacking through the jungle. I’m not really into that so I thought I’d sit down today and see if I could concoct a workaround that would allow me to put the ‘width’ and ‘height’ declarations in the CSS instead.

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That, in a nutshell is your three-step guide to instance class-creation happiness in AS3. Let me explain:

public function SomeClass ( name:String )
{
    _name = name;
    _init();
}
 
private function _init ():void
{
    // your initialisation code here...
    reset();
}
 
public function reset ():void
{
    // your reset code here...
}

This public - private - public approach to initialising your AS3 objects will make you life SO much easier. Let me tell you why:

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