Blog

So in the past 3 days I have been trying Flex I've had several out of memory errors that crashed my browser. I don't know if it is my operating system, my browser, Flash in general, or Flex, but it sucks. For the record I am using Windows XP Pro, IE 7, Flash 9, and Flex 3. This is what happens: As I develop, I keep hitting save in Flex Builder, waiting for it to recompile in the background, then Alt-tabbing over to IE and whacking F5 to refresh. Well, over the course of 2 or 3 hours of doing this, the memory usage for iexpolore.exe just keeps climbing and climbing as though there is a memory leak or garbage collection isn't happening.

Flex objects extending the UIComponent class have two events that fire during their creation process. The "initialize" event fires when the object is starting to be created, but before its children are created. "creationComplete" fires after that object and all its children have been created. There is a great post and example here. I found this out while trying to figure out an intermittent error I was getting when loading my Flex app that was related to trying to access an object prior to its creation.

Wow, I don't know if I have ever been so happy to get such a simple piece of code working. I have jumped into Flex 3 with basically no knowledge in order to make some charting functionality and I can confirm that I hate learning new stuff. I mean, I love it AFTERWARDS; but that time at the very beginning when you don't have a clue why your code won't work, Google isn't your friend, and you swear you're the first person in the world to have just received that weird error message-- yeah, that is the part that sucks.