Preface
I needed a break from Flex for mobile, and wanted to see if there were any other good application frameworks that allowed you to deploy to multiple devices beyond Adobe AIR. Tony Lukasavage had written about a few recently, and Matt Guest had written about his quick experience using Corona for games based on the buzz around Robert Nay, the 14 year old who knocked Angry Birds out of the top mobile game slot via Bubble Ball.
One way to design or skin ActionScript 3 projects is using the Flash IDE for graphical assets. Â You export your FLA as an SWC, and you can utilize those assets in your AS3 and/or Flex project. Â Flash CS3/CS4/CS5 have the ability to link to an ActionScript 3 class that represents the code behind the Symbol. Â If the Flash IDE doesn’t find the class in its source paths, it’ll create one for you.
The downside is, when you compile, you do not get errors if the Flash IDE didn’t find a class for a particular Symbol that’s set to have one. Â Maybe you mis-typed the package path or class name. Â Maybe you forgot to set the class path for the FLA. Â Maybe the FLA is in the wrong place. Â Whatever the reason, your code “won’t work” and you won’t know why. Â You may not get code hints in Flash Builder / FDT / IntelliJ, and certain other dependencies may be missing as well and you’ll be left wondering why.
Introduction
A friend asked about the potential to develop a set of ActionScript charts that looked good and would run on Mobile, specifically Android phones and iPhone. Apparently a client was asking, and he wanted to know the feasibility for re-use. We discussed the challenges with the existing Flex charts, specifically their lack of Flex 4 skinning abilities, but more importantly their lack of performance scalability.
Courtesy of Robin Debreuil.
