Flex Stuff by Gilles Guillemin

Like some others I’ve been working a lot recently in trying to improve the Adobe Flash Catalyst / Flash Builder workflow. I came up with a partial solution not so long ago, but it wasn’t exactly seamless and it most definitely needed a tool to act as a middle-man, to simplify synchronization between both softwares.

This is that tool: CatalystBuilderSync

And more than a long story, the second of a series of screencasts I’ve recorded yesterday should give you a good taste of what CatalystBuilderSync is capable of…

Remember, it’s a very early alpha version, so bugs, hiccups and other funny things are to be expected (and to be reported so I can fix them at some point).

You can download the latest version and give some feedback (I really need them) here:

CatalystBuilderSync 0.6.2

And please spread the word, I feel like this tool should be of interest to many of you.

This blog post is related to My LFPUG Presentation about Mate blog post.

If you haven’t done it yet you should have a look first at our previous examples: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, and #9.

Today we’re going to put aside our (I know: boooring) counters. We will come back to them in a couple of posts for the great finale: Mate and versioned applications.
But for now I wanted to illustrate a really good practice with Mate (and in general): the Presentation Model pattern. For those who want to know more about the Presentation Model, have a look at Paul Williams great article. Basically, the idea is to keep the view as simple as possible, separating all the logic in a dedicated class. That way, Mate communicates with the presentation model class and not directly with the view, the latter being updated via data binding. In this configuration, the view’s only concern is its own elements and its only dependency is its model.

Let’s have a look at our very simple demo (source is available by right-clicking on the demo after launching it):

#10 Presentation Model (click to Launch)

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This blog post is related to My LFPUG Presentation about Mate blog post.

This is the ninth of a series of gradually more complex examples on how to use Mate. If you haven’t done it yet you should have a look first at our previous examples: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, and #8.

By now, you should reasonably be up to speed so I’m going to speed up as well and throw examples more regularly but with less explanations (it takes some time that I don’t exactly have those days). If you really don’t get it though don’t hesitate to ask for further explanations in the comments.

In the previous example, we started to see how to use Mate with Modules but the main application was still keeping references to the module’s classes.

This example push decoupling a bit further (source is available by right-clicking on the demo after launching it):

#9 Modules Example (pt 2) (click to Launch)

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This blog post is related to My LFPUG Presentation about Mate blog post.

This is the eigth of a series of gradually more complex examples on how to use Mate. If you haven’t done it yet you should have a look first at our previous examples: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, and #7.

In our two previous examples, we saw how easy it was to handle communication between the application and its subcomponents, without mix-up between events intended to be listened by the whole application and events required only at the subcomponent level. But how would Mate hold up with with even looser subcomponents, of the kind that are loaded on demand and are not a concrete part of our main application, namely Modules?

I’m sure you know already it holds up pretty well, but let’s see how it does that:

#8 Modules Example (pt 1) (click to Launch)

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This blog post is related to My LFPUG Presentation about Mate blog post.

This is the seventh of a series of gradually more complex examples on how to use Mate. If you haven’t done it yet you should have a look first at our previous examples: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, and #6.

In the previous example, we added a reset countdown which sets all the counters to 0 when the countdown is off. But it’s a bit of a pain this unstoppable countdown. It would be cool to add a start/stop button, wouldn’t it?

OK, let’s do it (source is available by right-clicking on the demo after launching it):

#7 Reset Countdown (pt 2) (click to Launch)

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This blog post is related to My LFPUG Presentation about Mate blog post.

This is the sixth of a series of gradually more complex examples on how to use Mate. If you haven’t done it yet you should have a look first at our previous examples: #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5.

Today we’re going to add another useless functionality to our already useless application: a reset countdown. It’s a timer that resets all the counters when it reaches 0. The point here is to illustrate the communication (other than using data binding) between a manager and the rest of the application.

Here is the demo (source is available by right-clicking on the demo after launching it):

#6 Reset Countdown (part 1) (click to Launch)

As you can see, it’s pretty much the same application as before (visually speaking) except that there’s now a countdown showing up next to the MainView title. When it reaches 0 all your amounts, subAmounts and globalAmounts are reset to 0.

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This blog post is related to My LFPUG Presentation about Mate blog post.

This is the fifth of a series of gradually more complex examples on how to use Mate. If you haven’t done it yet you should have a look first at our previous examples: #1, #2, #3 and #4.

In the previous example, we added the capability to add/remove counters to the Tile component dynamically. Now let’s imagine that each counter is now embedding two subcounters, each one being capable of interacting with the other, but without affecting the subcounters in other counters.

The demo should probably be clearer (source is available by right-clicking on the demo after launching it):

#5 LocalEventMap (click to Launch)

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This blog post is related to My LFPUG Presentation about Mate blog post.

This is the fourth of a series of gradually more complex examples on how to use Mate. If you haven’t done it yet you should have a look first at our previous examples: #1, #2 and #3.

In the previous example, we manually added four counters to a Tile component. Let’s now add/remove those counters dynamically.

But let’s have a look at the demo first (source is available by right-clicking on the demo after launching it):

#4 Counters created dynamically (click to Launch)

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This blog post is related to My LFPUG Presentation about Mate blog post.

This is the third of a series of gradually more complex examples on how to use Mate. If you haven’t done it yet you should have a look first at our first example and at our second one.

And now let’s have a look on the demo (source is available by right-clicking on the demo after launching it):

#3 Multiple Counters (click to Launch)

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This blog post is related to My LFPUG Presentation about Mate blog post.

This is the second of a series of gradually more complex examples on how to use Mate. It’s still a fairly basic one and visually it looks just the same as our previous example.

But let’s first have a look on the demo (source is available by right-clicking on the demo after launching it):

#2 Databinding and EventHandlers (click to Launch)

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