Offer HN: Help with ActionScript 3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1838786

by dgant • 16 years ago

8 13 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Many or most developers I've spoken to have little or no familiarity with ActionScript.

I've spent two years working primarily in ActionScript 3. So if you have any questions about the language, about Flex, about Flash Player/AIR, about best practices, and so forth, I'll try to answer them.

znt• 16 years ago

I've been working on this webapp for quite sometime and I'd love to have some help with pyAMF + Flex best practices.

dgant6• 16 years ago

I haven't dealt with pyAMF but I have worked with AMF serialization. Do you have any particular questions about AMF?

nfriedly• 16 years ago

Would you mind taking a look at http://github.com/nfriedly/Javascript-Flash-Cookies/blob/mas... and letting me know if anything could be improved. For one thing, I think I have more try/catch statements than I need, but I'm not really sure what can throw errors.

(This is a flash cookies library. My company doesn't use it to invade people's privacy, but I know it could be used for that. If you don't want to contribute to something like that, I'd understand.)

Either way, thanks for the offer!

dgant6• 16 years ago

I haven't worked with Flash cookies so I have no feedback about that domain specifically. There are plenty of legitimate uses for them, so there's no need to add a disclaimer!

The Flex references do a pretty good job of documenting what errors are thrown by various library methods. I recommend doing error handling at the first point where an error can be thrown, because AS3's unchecked error system makes it difficult to otherwise ensure that errors don't unintentionally propagate all the way up the stack.

Often, all you will care about is success/failure of a call. That appears to be true in your code. In that case, you might as well Don't Repeat Yourself: just catch(error:Error), and proceed. If you want to record which particular error occurred, you can log error.message or flash.utils.getQualifiedClassName(error). Tangentially, that also futureproofs you against changes to the API like additional Error types that may be thrown.

dbrannan• 16 years ago

I've been working on this one webapp for quite some time, also. I'd love some help with drag & drop between two datagrids where any changes push a specific ID as an array to the database.

It's one of those things where you have been stuck for 3 days and are willing to pay someone move on.

dgant6• 16 years ago

I'd be happy to talk more about it. dsgant at gmail

aiurtourist• 16 years ago

Free book idea, which I got close to writing a few chapters of during the height of my ActionScript programming heyday: Flash for Programmers.

Getting started with Flash development is difficult for CS-trained programmers. Most tutorials seem aimed at designers or animators. I haven't seen a good description of the end-to-end tool suite for flash or a list of best practices (e.g., using Flash for animated assets, exporting to a SWC and importing symbols as objects).

dgant6• 16 years ago

That's definitely true, about the small intersection between {Flash fluent people} and {CS/software engineering fluent people}. My last company tried to find such people several times without success.

And indeed, that also means that many or most of the AS3/Flash resources out there are geared towards the copy-and-paste crowd.

mrschwabe2• 16 years ago

Do you know if there exists a set of template files or code for an demo iPhone UI?

I'd like to do an 'animated prototype' of my app - and Flash is definitely the solution - but it would be nice if someone has already done the basic animations (moving screens, button states, etc).

dgant6• 16 years ago

I don't know about iPhone-anything, but Flex offers a lot of the UI niceties you describe.

mrschwabe2• 16 years ago

Thanks, I'll look into it!

phoenix24• 16 years ago

This is such an excellent offer! I would definitely need your help.

I've been working on a project of mine, where I need to the webcam to take a photograph of the user. something like chatroulette, but i need users to take only the photo. then send it back to my server where i'll do further processing.

I am an ActionScript noob, so any help in libraries/sample code or approaches that you could offer would be immensly helpful.

Thanks!

dgant6• 16 years ago

I haven't worked with webcams. I imagine the AS3 docs, and the included examples, should cover your use case: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/

For sending the photo, you probably want to look at URLRequest: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/fl...

A solution might look like this:

1) Set up your server to accept HTTP POST requests which include a photo, in whatever data format you plan to transmit them

2) Obtain the image data from your webcam (I have no particular insight into this)

3) Create a URLRequest

4) Assign the URLRequest's 'url' property as appropriate

5) Assign the URLRequest's 'data' property to to the image data

6) Set the URLRequest's 'method' property to URLRequestMethod.POST

7) Set other URLRequest properties, like ' requestHeaders', as appropriate

8) Add event handlers to the URLRequest as appropriate

9) Call the URLRequest's load()

Offer HN: Help with ActionScript 3

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