Right, it’s been more than a month now, time to round up this tutorial. If you haven’t read the previous parts, here’s part 1, and here’s part 2.

In this chapter we’re going to fine-tune our component. The basic functionality is in it, but there isn’t really much communication with the outside world going on. We can change that using events, meta-tags, asdoc and we are also going to do some styling. more…

In part two of this tutorial, we’re gonna create the actual component. We left off with a flex library and a folder structure.

If you haven’t read the first part, click here.

Create a new actionscript class and name it after your component. Also, decide wether your class should extend an existing class. In this example it makes sense to extend the textinput class, which will provide the basic functionality. If your component will be part of the interface, you should extend sprite, or any underlying class of sprite. If your component doesn’t have any graphical interface, like a currency converter, you do not need to extend any class. more…

Not too long ago, someone asked me for some tips and tricks to write good components in AS3. Not that I’m the best coder or the most structured person, but when you’ve build some components, you’ll find that you’ll run in the same problems over and over again. Most of the problems you can avoid by starting to write down what your component actually should do. So you first can close flex builder .

For who is this tutorial? Well, I assume you’ve done some coding in AS3, so I won’t explain if-statements and for-loops. Anyone should be able to follow this tutorial, since there won’t be very exotic code in the examples. more…

When you’re developing an Actionscript project – Flash or Flex – you cannot live without a decent debugger. Flex provides quite a good debugger and the Flash IDE has also a reasonable debugger. The problem with those debuggers is that you have to build explicitly for the debugger. So when you’re deploying on a remote server, you don’t have those debug options.

The ASDebugger allows you to trace variables. It has support for strings, integers, arrays, dates, arraycollections, objects and everything in between.

Usage is simple, import the asdebug.as class in your application and call the debugger:

import nl.flplibrary.debug.ASDebugger;
import mx.collections.ArrayCollection;	
 
private function simpleDebug():void {
	ASDebugger.debug("<b>test</b>");
}
 
private function advancedDebug():void {
	var o:Object = new Object();
	o.my_string = "<i>string</i>";
	o.my_number = 123.456;
	o.my_int = parseInt("1");
	o.my_array = ["item 1", "item 2", "item 3"];
	o.my_arraycollection = new ArrayCollection([{label:"item 1", data: 1},
												{label:"item 2", data: 2},
												{label:"item 3", data: 3}]);
	o.my_object = {	label1:"item 1", data1: 1,
					label2:"<i>item 2</i>", data2: 2,
					label3:"item 3", data3: 3};
	o.my_date = new Date();
	o.my_xml = new XML();
	o.recurse = o;
 
	ASDebugger.debug_prop(o);
}

Before running the application, startup the ASDebugger. The ASDebugger comes in different flavors:

• In a .exe projector file;
• In a .swf;
• As an AIR application;
• or you can even use the ASDebugger on this page! more…