Thermo is coming…..

After a 3 part video regarding Thermo appeared in youtube many developers got excited about the product and started blogging about it. So FlexNotes also watched the video and read the blog posts with eagerness and anticipation.The author even had an imaginary conversation with a developer (referred to as D) proficient in many technologies as well as managing large scale projects. He also runs his own company.

Disclaimer: The conversation between FL and D that you are going to read is a work of fiction. It does not bear any resembalance to anyone living or dead in real world.Please stop reading further from the point where it starts hurting your feelings, sentiments etc.

FL: Do you know when Thermo is coming?
D(Dev) :No, we don’t.
FL: Have you really tried it out ?
D: No, but I have seen a video on the YouTube.
FL: But you have posted in your blog divdavdev.com that Thermo will generate bad code. How do you know that ?
D: Any such thing that is designer friendly is bound to produce bad code. Just like any WYSIWYG editor.
FL: Do you intend to use it in your organisation for developing RIAs, along with Flex builder?
D: Look, its a designers’ only product that helps a novice to draw a very fanciful image of an application in Photoshop and then import it and convert it into a working Flex project, of course by adding interactivity to it. So its only good for designers who do not know MXML or AS 3.0.But we don’t need it as we are very efficient in writing code in Flex builder to generate what we want.Hence WE do not need it.
FL: May be your designers will need it.
D: We don’t have a full time designer. Whenever we have any design requirements we just ask any freelancer to do it. That’s all.
FL: What do you do when design related change requests come from clients ? Do you send it to the designers again for changes ?
D: We try to do it ourselves. Once the main design has been done, it is easy to make small changes in Photoshop. Then again we always ask the clients to consider bad effects of changing UI such as increase in loading time, decrease in performance which will lead to more development efforts etc.
FL: Do the clients always agree ?
D: Most of the time they do.
FL: What happens if the client does not agree ?
D: We make necessary changes ourselves. Chink our best java developer knows Photoshop a little.We ask to him to make the small changes. He likes it. You should see his some of his photo editing capabilities in flickr.
FL: But RIA without designers does not sound very promising?
D: Actually we are trying very hard find very best designers, but so far we have no luck?
FL: What are your requirements ?
D: Very few. He should know Flex 2 (both MXML and Actionscripting) very well and must have some knowledge in one Server side language and should know one database.While we would be certainly happy if he has some experience in Swing, Hibernate or JSF but that is not mandatory. But he must know about design patterns.
FL: You expect a designer to know all that?
D: We want someone to work in our team with team spirit and all our team members are conversant with that.
FL: Do you think Thermo will introduce new way of developing RIAs?
D: It is difficult to say anything about that right now .
FL: It is being speculated that once Thermo comes out designers would take care of all design, UI and Interactivity related tasks which will leave developers to concern about all logic and database related things. Do you think this is possible ?
D: It is a very difficult thing to achieve because for that Thermo has to produce readable and maintainable code just as we developers do.
FL: And who says if the code is up to the standard ?
D: We.
FL: Are you afraid of the fact that once Thermo comes, some of the RIA market will go to designers or in some cases they will control a considerable portions of any applications to be developed using Flex ?
D: Let me make this very clear. We rule the enterprise application development world. Mere designers armed with Photoshop and Thermo can’t take it away from us. We won’t simply let them have any of it. They can keep learning and publishing nice tutorials in their pretty blogs but that’s it.

Notes on Moock’s EAS3.0 by Ashwinee – Instance Methods

Author: Ashwinee Kumar Dash.

Name of the Book: Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock

Copyright:
Disclaimer: Anything in quotation marks is a direct quotation from Essential
ActionScript 3.0. All other notes are my own summaries of the concepts
presented in the book.

These notes are for reference purpose only and not intended to replace the book .Therefore I would strongly advise you to read the original book as well as make your own notes wherever necessary.

Send your suggestions and feedbacks to aswhineedash[at]gmail[dot]com or aswhinee2004[at]gamil[dot]com.

Instance Methods

• The keyword this can be omitted as ActionScript automatically searches for the instance variable or method unless there is a local one available matching the search result.
• Usage of the keyword this is legal only in the following cases instance method, constructor method, functions and code in global scope.
• Method can be assigned as value to variable and again can be invoked through that variable. Such methods are known as bound methods.
• This is most used when one section of program wishes to instruct another section of the program to invoke a particular method on a particular object.
• Get method is used to retrieve the value of the private instance property
• To define get method get keyword is used.
• Get methods have a return type as they have the return value
• Similarly set methods are used to modify the values of variables.
• To define a set method set keyword is used.
• Unlike get methods set methods do not have return values.
• To invoke set or get methods “()” is not used.
• In case of set methods a value is assigned rather than any arguments are passed
• To deal with unknown number of parameters ….(rest) can be used where (rest) is the array of arguments. Just like any array arguments can be retrieved using array index.

Notes on Moock’s EAS3.0 by Ashwinee – Static Variables and Methods

Author: Ashwinee Kumar Dash.

Name of the Book: Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock

Copyright:
Disclaimer: Anything in quotation marks is a direct quotation from Essential
ActionScript 3.0. All other notes are my own summaries of the concepts
presented in the book.

These notes are for reference purpose only and not intended to replace the book .Therefore I would strongly advise you to read the original book as well as make your own notes wherever necessary.

Send your suggestions and feedbacks to aswhineedash[at]gmail[dot]com or aswhinee2004[at]gamil[dot]com.

Static Variables and Methods

• Static variables are class variables, not instance variables. Static variables do not vary from instance to instance
• Static keyword defines the variable to be a class variable
• Four access control modifiers available and they are public, private, internal and protected. These modifiers come before the static keyword.
• Inside the class static variables can be used as regular variables. But otherwise it has to be accessed by using className.variable.
• Inside a class a static variable and an instance variable of same names can coexist.
• Constant is a variable with a value that do not change throughout the program
• It is defined using the keyword const in stead of var
• Like static variables, static methods define functionality that relate to an entire class.
• Static methods cannot use the keyword this.
• Static methods cannot access instance variables and instance methods of the class where it is defined. quite logical.
• When ActionScript creates a class at runtime, it creates a method called class initializer and runs it.
• In the class initializer it places all the static variables and all class level code that is not instance variable or instance method.
• Every class in ActionScript is represented at runtime as an instance of the Class class.
• Class objects are primarily used to access static properties and static methods.
• Like other objects class objects can be used as values for assigning and return type.

Notes on Moock’s EAS3.0 by Ashwinee – Class

Author: Ashwinee Kumar Dash.

Name of the Book: Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock

Copyright:
Disclaimer: Anything in quotation marks is a direct quotation from Essential
ActionScript 3.0. All other notes are my own summaries of the concepts
presented in the book.

These notes are for reference purpose only and not intended to replace the book .Therefore I would strongly advise you to read the original book as well as make your own notes wherever necessary.

Send your suggestions and feedbacks to aswhineedash[at]gmail[dot]com or aswhinee2004[at]gamil[dot]com.

Classes

• Classes are the blue prints upon which objects are built.
• Every object that you see in a program has a class of its own.
• Classes written from scratch known as custom classes.
• Built in classes are used to perform some fundamental tasks
• Classes built directly into ActionScript are known as native classes.
• Classes are created by using class keyword.

Notes from Colin Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0

I would like to thank Colin for allowing me to publish my own notes that I had jotted down while studying his (essential) book aptly titled Essential ActionScript 3.0.

In my opinion it is the best book currently available to learn Object Oriented Programming using Actionscript 3.0. The following three categories of readers can benefit from the book

• those who are new to OOP and AS 3.0 ( they will find it most useful).
• those wishing to upgrade from AS 2.0 to AS 3.0 will need this book to understand concepts like e4x, display architecture, Flash player security and events and event handling etc.
• C# or C++ or java developers wishing to use AS 3.0 in their Flex projects won’t find such in depth knowledge and coverage of AS3.0 in any other book.

The importance of AS 3.0 has increased in these days due to quick adoption of Flex and to use Flex to its fullest extent one must know AS 3.0 inside out . When it comes to ActionScript, nobody teaches you the better than Colin Moock.

I, like countless others have learnt a lot about ActionScript and Flash just by reading his books. I hope he continues to write more about ActionScript, a popular language destined to become.