Occasional Thoughts

When reading through ActionScript code I frequently see two ActionScript mistakes that are likely to cause runtime misbehavior and confusions. Sometimes thing do not appear at first glance what you might think at the beginning. However both ActionScript bumps can easily be driven around. 

Update 2010-02-17: Many thanks to James Ward for sending me the pointers to a couple of Jira Issues in the Adobe Bug and Issue Management System that cover the points below. I have added the links to these issues.

As a Java developer, who worked for more than a year with Flex I suffered from a couple of pain points - features that I am missing badly in Action Script 3.0. Here is my personal list of things that I wish Adobe would incorporate into Action Script 4.0:

Maven module structure of the project.

You can see that there is one high level library (library A) that is shared across all applications and a more specialized library (library B) that is providing components and classes to a certain subset of other applications.

Library A contains a couple of embedded images containing various icons and a lot of components, while Library B contained just a few components. So after compilation the obvious expected result would be to have an RSL file of library A that is much bigger than the RSL file of library B in case library B uses library A as RSL and not as statically linked SWC.

Well the dynamic linkage worked well for all the applications, which where just a couple of KBs in size after the change in contrast to more than 1 MB before the change. However this was not the case for the libraries. Library A had a size of 1.2 MB but library B had a size of 1.25 MB???

When I tried to update another project to flexmojos-maven-plugin 3.x I realized that I missed a step, when I wrote the upgrade instructions from flex-mojos 2.0.0 to the newer plugin. While the first project was at its very beginning with no Unit tests existing yet, the newer project had already quite some unit tests.

When running maven after I followed my own instructions I go this error:

[ERROR] <PROJECT PATH>/target/test-classes/TestRunner.mxml:[-1,-1] Unable to locate specified base class 'org.sonatype.flexmojos.unitestingsupport.TestApplication' for component class 'TestRunner'.