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Flash Remoting and resultsets for ActionScript 3

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 22 September, 2008
in desing patterns, flash, opensource and php
. 7 Comments

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.
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Specification pattern for selection on lists

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 11 September, 2008
in desing patterns and dpdk
. 0 Comments

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.
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Flash Media Server and using RemoteId

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 9 September, 2008
in dpdk and fms
. 3 Comments

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.
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The Log and LogEvent classes.

Published
by
Thomas Brekelmans
on 7 September, 2008
in dpdk and opensource
. 0 Comments

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.)
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AsUnit modification for asynchronous testing

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 5 September, 2008
in asunit, desing patterns, flash and fms
. 2 Comments

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.
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AsUnit unit testing on flash package

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 9 August, 2008
in asunit, desing patterns, flash and xunit
. 1 Comment

One of the main things that need to be done to create any serious kind of software package, is making sure that it is tested to make qualitative statements about the code itself, be able to use it with confidence and to make sure it will continue to work when changes to the code are made.

For our package, one of the goals was to create high quality code, with unittesting in place to make sure the code will behave as expected.
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Open source initiative by dutch media agency dpdk

Published
by
Rolf Vreijdenberger
on 10 July, 2008
in flash
. 0 Comments

The idea is born, so in this first post, the why, when, what and how goes here, well… actually it goes here :)