Blogs

Being a member of the Adobe user group management community has its perks. It's a really diverse group of extremely intelligent and gifted individuals that don't mind sharing their time, talent and wisdom and this helps keep the user group community thriving.

For those that don't know, Alchemy is a research project being conducted by Adobe and Automata Studios that allows developers to compile C/C++ into ActionScript that's capable of running in the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2).

KwikUML is now open-sourced and hosted courtesy of RIAForge. Full source code and API documentation has been posted just in time for Xmas!! Feel free to pitch in if you're interested in helping to further this project...

It's been an extremely long hiatus over the past few months being totally immersed in work yet again. A lot has happened during that time from insane project burns to promotions to community involvement, etc. so, I forced myself today to sit through some certification testing today and took and passed the Adobe Flex 3 and AIR certification exam (an early Xmas gift to myself ).

It's 50 questions covering the following topic areas:

• Creating a User Interface (UI)
• Flex system architecture and design
• Programming Flex applications with ActionScript

The next version of Flash Player will offer a lot of enhancements to the user experience and it seems Adobe listened to the developer community on a few of the features. Here's one that is sure to be huge:

Thought I'd blog about this since I haven't seen this posted before and it comes up from time to time. With AS3, we got access to a new function parameter, the ...rest parameter, which allows us to pass in a dynamic list of parameters for usage by our functions. Here's an example:

// Method in SomeClass
public function someMethod(...rest):void
{
    for (var i:uint=0; i < rest.length; i++)
    {
        trace(rest[i]);
    }
}

That will trace out each ...rest parameter that you pass to the method call like so:

// Usage from SomeOtherClass

I had a breakthrough recently on several usability bugs that were bothering me. For a habitual work-a-holic like myself, hurdling obstacles makes it all worth the long, sleepless nights. Although it's hard to find time to devote to it because of my official workload, it's still rewarding to see KwikUML grow in spite of my unintentional neglect.

I wanted to spend some time this morning updating my FB3 plugin for Eclipse to the release version and had grown accustomed to the previous upgrade process:

1. Download your DMG
2. Install to /Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in
3. Go grab some coffee

So I snuck in some more time early this morning to enable diagrams and exports of MySQL table schemas in KwikUML. I also removed the Print Documentation button until I have time to work on that feature and added a context menu to the canvas that allows you to export code and images, as well as, clear the canvas.

Things have been really busy lately and I haven't had much time to be in the lab. So, I snuck in a couple of minutes today to see if I could get PHP 5 support wired into my UML tool, KwikUML. I thought I had an uphill battle, but I actually had everything wired already and just had to fill in one method body and in minutes I had PHP class and interface stub code exporting.