Blog

Well, once again this is a pretty basic post of information readily available on the Internet. It took me seemingly forever to piece it all together, so I am blogging it to cement it in my mind and hopefully help someone else down the road. This week I have conquered the formatting of my X and Y axis labels for my charts. As usual, the hoops are a little bulky to jump through when you just want to add a very simple bit of formatting, but the flexibility is awesome.

I feel dumb saying this, but I am having a heck of a time finding consistent information about Flex 3 classes. I am just starting in Flex and it isn't TOO hard to find an example out there that is close to what you are doing, but often times examples don't cover all the bases, and I'll need to look up a method to get its exact signature. (How many arguments, what type, etc) Generally, I'll turn to the livedocs for this, but I have been wasting a lot of time Googling and I don't think it should be this hard.

If you have been programming in Flex for a while, I have nothing earth-shattering to say here. Nevertheless, having just figured it out I wish to write it down as much for my sake as anyone else. My latest task, simple as it was, involved formatting the numbers in several of my Data Grids as dollars and cents.

I have been enjoying my dip into Flex so far. Sometimes you don't notice habits until you have to change them. One rut I've gotten into over the years is the procedural way web-based apps have gotten be thinking about programming.

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.

Well, to add to my list of interesting errors encountered with Flex; yesterday I started getting a JavaScript "Permission Denied" when I tried to run my app. The app would run fine but I would get that error every time the page loaded. After commenting out a bunch of stuff, I realized it had started when I added the mx:TabNavigator tag. I finally traced the error down to some JavaScript in the history/historyframe.html file which controls deep linking.

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.

Well, I'm settling in to my new job and today my boss showed me an old third-party app they have which shows a dashboard of bar charts outlining the companies progress. It's a nifty little program that lets you drill down into the data and choose different graph types. They wanted to do a face-lift on the graphs, add a little more functionality, and make it web-accessible so it could be viewed remotely. It didn't take me long to sell him on the charting package built into Flex 3 Professional.

Check out the juicy details here: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Gumbo One new item of interest is the new incentive program. The first two people to get 10 approved patches to the open source Flex project will get their way paid to Max!