Most all web applications that I have worked on really break down to same types of components. There is usually a grid, perhaps a chart, maybe tab navigator at the top and, of course, a filtering mechanism. Lots of times, you will use the filtering down to the sql level to get data. However, its not always necessary to do that. The DataGrid component within flex does have a filterFunction property and there is no reason we shouldn’t take advantage of that. In some cases, depending on our object model, its tough to do that a “framework level”.
Now when I am coding up framework level components, I do try to keep application specific logic separate from just core components. (common sense. otherwise its not a framework level component). But I feel that a large amount people feel the filtering logic is all application specific and don’t necessarily take the time to write something in a more clean, reusable way. I have come up with a more usuable method of creating and adding filters dynamically at run time.
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Marcel Flex, tutorial Actionscript, Flex, howto, tutorial
Now a days, BlazeDS is a pretty well known framework for retrieving data for a flex application. It has even been integrated into a recently released package of Spring. It is an open source, scaled down version of Life Cycle Data Services. It doesn’t have all the glamor as LCDS, but its still 100% useful in most applications.
One of the great features it has taken from LCDS is the ability to support data push. Namely, data push with remote objects, which is great. No more having the client continuously call the server to see if there is new data to be shown. The server is the one who lets the client knows via an httpchannel. So now not only do you get to not have to keep polling, checking for data, but you also get to have remote objects integrated into your application.
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Marcel Flex, tutorial Actionscript, blazeds, Flex, howto, tutorial
So when I last posted an article, I did an example on PureMvc. It was just something small and simple. One of the thing I do not like about PureMvc though (plan on writing an article about this later) is the mediators “handleNotification” function. It seems to almost be common practice with PureMvc that you have this function and it just turns into a massive switch statement to find out what came back, where it goes, how its handled, etc. Fine some something small, but we have all seen what can happen with rogue switch statements. I’m sure there are more eligant work arounds for this, but I see it as a decent sized flaw.
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Marcel Flex, tutorial Actionscript, fabrication, Flex, howto, puremvc, tutorial