Lately there is alotof buzz about Flex application performance, keeping your memory low and just in general, keeping everything managed under your fingers and not just counting on the flex framework to manage your memory.Flex has a garbage collector, but it’s a bit special on the way it handles memory, so I thought I would layout some general rules on how to keep memory low. First thing we need to understand is that any application we will build in our careers will be using some amount of memory, and because memory is not infinite, we should keep our applications memory as low as possible.…

I have been working with flex and consulting about flex development for quite some time now. I guess about 3 years of consulting and 4 years of hands-on development. I have seen flex applications written in many ways: mxml files, as files, namespaces and more. I guess there is no “right” way to do so, or at least not just one “right” way. These past few months, I have started working with mxml files in a way I think is very convenient.…

I recently encountered a strange bug on a database of a client, which I designed. The “bug” was that the paths he entered into the database got truncated, because it was too long of a string. I made the field length at 250 chars and he needed more. The problem was he already submitted quite some data into the database and could not remember where the paths were extra long. So, I needed to find it for him so he could re-submit those.…

Sometimes, you may need to edit the hosts file on the mac. The hosts file is a file that controls the routing to websites, both localhost and other websites. For example, I can say that whenever I enter http://www.kensodev.com in the browser, the address is then traced back to 127.0.0.1 instead of going to the DNS server and lookup the address there. This is a very efficient way to do testing to websites, so you don’t have to use localhost or everything.…

After declaring the opening of the category – Link Bag, the first post is fresh and hot out of the oven. CSS CSS sprites workflow– Chris Coyier posted a very useful tip about the workflow of creating a website when you plan to use sprite css, he suggests a two-step process. Freelancing Are You Giving Back to Your Community?– FreelanceSwitch with another great post. I actually posted on a very similar subject here “should all developer be (active) members in the virtual community.…

Well, I have decided. After a while of reading very interesting blogs and stumbling upon quite a few useful links for fellow developers, I decided to put together a new category in the blog. The category will be called “link bag” and I will post new things to it on a weekly basis hopefully. The links will vary from technology links to freelancing tips, everything that is an interest to me and hopefully for the readers of this blog as well.…

Usually when I blog, I make comments, raise decisions, write code or something like that, it’s never a question. This post, above anything else is a question and a try to spark a debate from my fellow developers and software craftsman out there. Earlier this week I started working on a very interesting project for an international company creating test suites for devices and applications. The suite is cross platform and can run on any machine both windows and Linux and test any device, from mobile phones to DVD’s to diving sensors.…

As a web developer, I’m working on lots of things. Today, while working on a windows machine and trying to run an ANT task and then run JBoss to test my build, I encountered this error: [shell] java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException: cp1255 [/shell] After quite some time of Googling and finding nothing, I remembered I changed my regional settings on the machine to use Hebrew as the locale. This appeared to be a mistake.…

Hi All, I have been using the RobotLegsMVC framework for flexfor about a month and a half now, I have been using MATEbefore that and PureMVCbefore that, I have never got so much out of an MVC framework, it is so flexible, so customizable (the code is on git) and helps me with my tasks all of the time. So, why have I posted it on the blog and not just tweeted about it?…

Hi All, Well, me being an enthusiastic flex developeris no secret, nor me being a GIT fan-boy. I thought it will be helpful to post my template for the gitignore files in all repositories containing flex projects. This is how it looks like: [shell] .DS_Store .actionScriptProperties .flexProperties .project .settings/* bin-debug/* [/shell] The reason I’m ignoring all the settings files and the properties files is because all of these are environment specific, often not all developers on the team use the same settings and properties and that can break the entire working process.…