Providing data to your flash movie can be done through javascript, through loading data from xml, UrlVariables (post and get) or flash remoting with the actionscript message format (amf), or by passing FlashVars to your movie at embed time in your html page. We are using a software design pattern known as a Registry to be able to have easy access to our externally provided parameters known as FlashVars throughout our application.
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In every campaign we create we implement some mechanism to measure what the user is doing with and within our application. After all, we want to see the results and be able to have a good analysis of the application’s efficiency. We use a variety of techniques, depending on the client’s wishes: Google analytics, webtrends, dmfacts or a custom implementation where we log stuff via our custom logging framework.
What all these implementations have in common is the necessity to be able to track stuff from within flash in a generic way. We only want to do a little customization for every application, while using the same method to track or log stuff in every application. For this purpose we created the nl.dpdk.log.statistics package.
Continue reading ‘Tracking user activities inside your application with the Tracker’
We have made a great step for Dutch interactive agencies by releasing some of the source code we work with (flash actionscript 3) to the general public.
The announcement was just made at the newly launched website of the dutch adobe user group and on our website (dutch).
Continue reading ‘Open Source package released on dutch Adobe User Group’
One of the great features of our opensource as3 package is that it contains a flash remoting package (nl.dpdk.services.remoting), for sending data via the amf protocol, that is fully integrated with our collections package to also be able to use a ResultSet. It is robust, fully unittested, has the power of sorting and selecting via the underlying lists from our collections package and has some very very very convenient features that really make it shine when using remoting as a means of communicating with a remote service.
update 2008-10-21: we added a timeout detection mechanism.
Continue reading ‘Flash Remoting and resultsets for ActionScript 3′
One thing I really like to use is selection or validation based on the Specification pattern, as originally proposed by Martin Fowler and Eric Evans.
Specifications are a very powerful way to perform selection, searching and validation on any object without putting the logic on the object itself. We would really like a way to reuse our business logic, throughout our application, in several use cases, without cluttering our domain object. We also want a way to generalize the selection criterium on a list kind of structure, instead of writing a wrapper around a list based structure that holds some logic that is needed for our problem domain. We also need a way to explicitly state what our business logic is and make it easily reachable, as business logic changes all the time, depending on the wishes of the client, the users of the application, on the weather and other stuff beyond our control ;). This is where the Specification pattern is a great way of doing business with our application.
Continue reading ‘Specification pattern for selection on lists’
When working with multiuser applications, the method of choice in flash is the flash media server (fms). The main alternatives are wowza, a commercial server for streaming media and red5, the opensource alternative.
No matter what server you use, keeping track of the connected users is one of the main things that need to be done correctly. We need to be able to communicate with each and every user from our clientside application via the fms, we need to be able to keep track of them and be able to know what and how something changed about their data. We want to be able to target specific users and send them messages, we want to know which user has sent us a message etc.
Continue reading ‘Flash Media Server and using RemoteId’
In this article I would like to elaborate a little on two of the more basic classes in our tool kit, namely Log and LogEvent. Both can be found in the nl.dpdk.log package.
Log and LogEvent are used in conjunction with each other and are used to log messages and act as a substitute for Flash’s built-in trace statement. (But you probably figured all that out by just looking at the class names so I’m going to delve in a little deeper and provide you with some usage examples here.)
Continue reading ‘The Log and LogEvent classes.’
In an earlier post I wrote something about unittesting with the asunit framework.
In this post I want to shed some light on asynchronous testing and a minor modification we made to the asunit package to be able to run asynchronous tests that can be used to do some flow testing, especially important when the order of the calls to a remote server is important.
Continue reading ‘AsUnit modification for asynchronous testing’