Looking at the world of media: from music to RIA.

Articles

The Articles section of Vivisecting Media is a filtered archive of posts that are more “articles” then blog posts. The challenge with any blog is that relevant articles can easily be lost once they are moved off the front page. As I write more articles and feel they should be more sticky I will update this page to keep access to the posts as easy as possible.

Design Patterns

Design Patterns are solutions / recommendations for solving common problems in code and/or applications. Some Design Patterns are very specific in how they are applied (Singleton Pattern) and others are more general solutions that can be modified or extended upon (Model/View/Controller). This section links to Design Patterns that I have written about or to 3rd party articles that I feel are relevant to development in the RIA space.
  • Flex Code-Behind Pattern

    This posts discusses how the Flex Code-Behind Pattern is implemented in MXML and ActionScript and why developers should separate their Flex layout from their logic.

  • The Extendable Singleton Pattern

    This posts discusses how the Singleton Pattern can be implemented in ActionScript that allows for extending of the base Singleton Class type.

VivMedia Code Depot

The Vivisecting Media Code Depot is an open source project that provides a core set of Flash/Flex classes which help enable faster RIA development. The initial code base is small but the goal is to evolve the code into a robust framework that can provide developers a complex set of tools to help rapidly build and deploy web driven applications. The code depot is hosted on Google Code and is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Both the compiled SWC and source with ASDocumentation is available.

VivMedia Code Depot Tutorials and Documentation

One of my goals with the VivMedia Code Depot is to provide up-to-date documentation and tutorials for the tools that are provided. Its one thing to have a robust Framework but if developers can’t use them due to lack of understanding then the entire purpose of the Framework is lost. As new features are added I will write up posts both here and on the Google Code Wiki. I do ask that you bare with me in the beginning because there is a LOT to write about and I only have so much free time right now.

  • Selection Controller

    The Selection Controller is a singleton utility that allows you to treat any item that implements ISelectable as part of a group. You can then select an item in the group and then have the rest of the items in the group deselect. This enables you to treat any group of ISelectable items as you would a radio button group.

  • Event Broker

    The EventBroker is a Singleton Facade class that enables objects to broadcast and subscribe to any Event that is routed through a single location.

  • Hash Table

    The HashTable is a data-structure that enables key/value pairing and lookup. The HashTable provides a simplified API for quick access and manipulation of the stored data.

  • Local Connection Manager

    This tool helps manage Flash LocalConnections and retain object typing across Flash applications.