Archive | August, 2009

On Toolkits vs Frameworks: Why not both and how OpenPyro does it

I was just catching up on Keith Peter’s blog and one of the posts that really caught my attention was on Toolkits vs Frameworks. The defining difference between the two, as Keith quotes Gamma, is “Toolkits do not attempt to take control for you…”.The Framework vs. Toolkit debate was in my mind when I started [...]

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My take on the “Has ActionScript failed” debate

There is a lot of buzz going around twitter and the blogosphere the last couple of days around the future of AS3 and what the community wants. These discussions include Joa Ebert’s post on community contribution, language extensions and compiler performance, Nicolas Cannasse’s (author of the Haxe programming language) post on AS3 as a failed [...]

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Optimized List: A pure AS3 List with renderer recycling

One of the things that the Flex List component does pretty well is handle large data collections (Arrays, ArrayCollections, etc). The List uses renderer recycling when displaying data, ie, it creates an itemRenderer only for the items that are displayed and not for each item in the dataProvider. As items scroll offscreen, the renderers associated [...]

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