They include an air contact manager, and two sound equalizer how-tos with one of them showing how to get those cool pv3d equalizers.

Enjoy!

Lately I've working on three big projects that would require the usage of a framework, and not wanting to extend my own framework, that consists mostly of accumulated libraries over time, I decided to give the most prominent ones a go.

So I started by checking out what was on the market, I found as-hive, pureMVC, Cairngorm and Mate ( there are a few more but somehow I didn't feel they were mature enough to be used.

Now for a little background on this quest for the framework, and few of my personal opinions on the whole framework business.
The point of a framework is to aid you in the making of your application/website, this can be the handling of repetitive tasks for you, providing a strict way of coding and thus giving you a common ground of understanding with your peers. Also it's meant to enable you to code more efficiently, make your code more readable and produce a scalable product that you can, even at a later date, modify without breaking everything.
What they are NOT meant to do is to force a coding style that makes feel restricted, uncomfortable with and most important they shouldn't be extra work. It feels pretty pointless to have to code 3 times as more to have the same functionality, some of you might immediately argue "but what about scalability?" well sometimes that's not everything, in the real work time matters.

Ok, now that we got that out of the way let's move on to the frameworks.
The project that required me to start first was a PV3D website that heavily relies on dynamic content. So I checked out pureMVC and as-hive and quickly decided to go with pureMVC.
So then I went on to the forums and examples pages and tried to read all that mattered to me, plus I found nice diagrams that help you out alot in the beginning.
As I delved more into the project I realized that some extending and heavy integration of PV3D and pureMVC would be required in order to make things easy for me, plus the project relies on the URL to know where it is and react accordingly, this was easy enough, simple and clear.

So my opinion on pureMVC is that it's the perfect framework for AS3 projects because it's easily extensible, highly functional, doesn't force you to adopt a specific style but still requires you to have rules and standards.

The next project is an AIR Application that will mimic some of the functionality of Powerpoint so I immediately thought of Cairngorm, but then I heard about Mate (pronounced mah-tey) and it seemed like the perfect solution.

So having already started development with Cairngorm when I heard about Mate, it felt like a risk to change, but nevertheless a risk worthwhile taking should Mate be more practical and provide me with a faster environment in which to code.
Well Mate does look great on paper ( and I printed the architecture) but somehow it feels like it still hasn't achieved critical mass to be used, now don't get me wrong it's a great framework and I'm sure that with some extra work I'd be in love with it, but at the moment I just didn't have the time to try and figure out somethings on my own and the forums don't have that many topics, plus the examples are far too simple. So I'm sticking with Cairgnorm for the time being.
Cairgorm is a must know for any Flex developer, it's the official framework which means that plenty of clients will feel more comfortable with ,or even ask for it.

That said I started using Cairngorm and eventually grew to like it, I liked the ViewModelLocator and the self dispatching event model, and it did eventually make my work easier.

And to finalize I'll go into no frameworks at all because sometimes a framework is just an overkill, some might say that it's always the best solution, but not always. Sometimes we just need to develop a small application/website and using a framework is actually extra work than just making it the fastest way possible and if it needs updates after they should be easy enough, if they aren't, well you can always refactor it into a framework based app. This works well for me because of years of accumulated libraries that provide me with most of the common tasks i need, many of them published here on DIF.

So that's enough and if you read all the way here congratulations, and please leave me your thoughts.

There it’s a class to load an xml file synchronous.

How to use:

var configXml:XML = XmlLoader.load("Config.xml");

The details and pricing for Flex3 can be found here and I find them quite accessible for a full version going only for CHF 319.00, it's a bargain for the best Flash/Flex development IDE.

As for AIR it now has a nice little official Adobe link, and they even show an impressive list of clients for a just released product, featuring the likes of ebay and nasdaq.

So get your copy of Flex3 while it's fresh, I know I'll get mine

Ah, also for those of us who live in Europe we'll have plenty of chances to catching the on.air tour here's the link with the dates.

The first time I ran the app (with only one circle), I was surprised to see my Pentium 4 (3.2 ghz) reach 30% of cpu usage to animate that single sprite. It the window had the transparency turned off the cpu usage would be 0-1%.

The second time I ran the app (with 10 circles), the frame-rate dropped dramatically from 24 to 12-fps, and the cpu usage went up to 50%. At this moment I truly believed that what I wanted to do could not be accomplished. I mean, with only 10 sprites moving around the screen all I get are 12-fps...

Having the AIR runtime installed on my mac (powerPC 1.5 ghz) I tried running the app with the 10 circles to have a laugh at the poor performance. When I saw the app running my jaw dropped... My mac was running the AIR app with the transparent window and the 10 sprites moving around at 24-fps. How could this be... I know for a _fact_ that the flash performance is ALOT worse on my mac than on the PC., so how could the mac be behaving so well... It it because macosx uses the gpu to render the windows? And because AIR is using one of those windows it's being rendered by the gpu instead of the cpu?

I decided to google for a while and found out that Windows uses layered windows to display transparent windows and that AIR is using that. I also read that when using layered windows the drawing of the windows goes into an off-screen buffer (probably inside the graphics card)

So I decided to draw 100 sprites inside the AIR app. Guess what happened? The frame-rate was still at 12-fps and the cpu was still at 50% the same values I got when drawing 10 sprites. At this moment I thought that maybe the frame-rate was so low because I have a very old graphics card.

I used another PC with a similar cpu (Pentium 4 3.4ghz) but with a kick-ass graphical card. The result: 70-fps and 15% cpu usage.

My guess is that because AIR is using transparent windows, the OS is rendering it inside the graphics card (remember the off-screen buffer) instead of the cpu.

Can anyone confirm this?

update: After a short discussion with ivan, I reckon that all flash "stuff" is still done in the flash player and is _not_ hardware accelerated. However, the transparency calculations, are done in the graphics card. If you have a good graphics card you don't need to overload the cpu with those calculations and you can use it for the flash calculations.

So how can you create an AIR Application in an Actionscript Project with Flex Builder 3 beta?

I found the answer in Mark Walters BlogIn a nutshell

• create a Flex Project
• choose AIR as the application type
• click next
• click next again
• rename the main application file from .mxml to .as

A co-worker of mine needed an application that would make it easy for him to take snapshots of .flv files for a content management system, so i came up with the idea of having a go and doing it with air.

So as a follow up i'll make a little tutorial explaining how it works. As Usual you can have a look in the code for the intructions. And should you have any questions feel free to ask them.

Air application file -Thumb

Update: Now published with the final AIR version.