Richard Lord

My 360|Flex presentation

Richard — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:25:04 +0000

Until recently, the title for my 360|Flex San Jose presentation next month was “Designer Last Development Architecture”. But that has just changed...

Frameworks presentation slides

Richard — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:06:03 +0000

Here are the slides from my frameworks presentation at Flex London User Group last Tuesday, 16 February 2010.

360|Flex San Jose

Richard — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:35:32 +0000

I was already considering making the trip to San Jose to attend the 360|Flex conference this March when the organisers asked me if I'd present a session. 360|Flex has interested me for some time. It's the most technical, developer oriented of the many Flash and Flex conferences around, and as a developer myself that obviously interests me. The level of technical knowledge amongst the speakers is immense.

But 360|Flex is about more than just technical presentations. John and Tom try very hard to make this a conference where all attendees feel part of a community...

Presentation about Frameworks in London

Richard — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:14:19 +0000

I'm revisiting and updating my frameworks presentation for Tuesday's meeting of the Flex London User Group. The presentation will cover Cairngorm, PureMVC, Mate, Swiz, Parsley, and Robotlegs. I'll be looking at the similarities and differences between the frameworks and the trend towards dependency injection and loose coupling in the newer frameworks...

Test the interface, not the implementation

Richard — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:50:03 +0000

In yesterday's post, I mentioned that unit tests should test the interface and not the implementation. This is the simplest example I could think of to demonstrate this...

Why write the unit tests first?

Richard — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:51:56 +0000

At work today, a colleague and I did a presentation to the rest of the team on Test Driven Development. At BrightTALK we've been using unit tests for some of our code for a few months now, but it's been very much a case of writing tests after writing the code. Often, it's just after (write the code, then write the test) but still, the code came first. A couple of months ago I persuaded the Flash/Flex team to try writing the tests first. They found it difficult for the first few days, but rapidly got up to speed and are now very enthusiastic about writing tests first. So we hosted this presentation/discussion with the whole team, Actionscript, PHP and Java developers, to discuss Test Driven Development. One thing I really wanted to convey to them were the benefits of writing the test first. These are the five main benefits as I see them...

The iPad is not a computer

Richard — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:10:45 +0000

I waited a few days before writing about the iPad. Apple product launches tend to contain some surprises and I wanted a little time for reflection before commenting.

My considered opinion: the iPad is a revolutionary device, because it's not a computer. The iPad isn't for writing, it's for reading. It's not for making films, its for watching films. It's not for developing software, it's for using software. The iPad is a consumer device. What makes the iPad revolutionary is its single-minded focus on media consumption...

New Year, New Domain

Richard — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:23:01 +0000

Since I accepted my current job at BrightTALK and closed down my company, Big Room, I’ve also moved my domain. This site is now hosted at richardlord.net rather than bigroom.co.uk. All links to the previous domain should redirect to the new domain – please let me know if any don’t. This blog was always about my [...]

Smartypants-ioc and As3-signals example

Richard — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:19:58 +0000

During my recent presentation at LFPUG, Tink was very persistent in suggesting that the event bus used in most MVC frameworks might not be the best solution. This got me thinking about what it would be like to do MVC without an event bus. And so began this little experiment...

Robotlegs example project with source

Richard — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:57:16 +0000

Any comparison of frameworks wouldn't be complete without Robotlegs. I included Robotlegs in my session at LFPUG recently, but didn't post the example project here because the framework was in a state of flux. Robotlegs is now settling down as it approaches its imminent 1.0 release, and the MVCS implementation in it is unlikely to change further, so here's my example.

For this Robotlegs example I've used exactly the same project as in the previous examples for other frameworks. Robotlegs is not prescriptive about your application's architecture, but it does include a default MVCS implementation for those that wish to use it. I've used that default implementation here.

The example is below. Links to the other versions follow. All versions have identical functionality. Right click on the swf to view the source...