Learn About the Flex Component Cycle for Halo and Spark Components

Folks! Man, its been awhile since I’ve posted. My bad, my bad. At least I have something fun to share!

I’ll be speaking at 2 user group meetings next week (Tuesday in San Francisco, Wednesday in San Jose) all about Flex component lifecycle. I’ll cover (briefly) the Flex 3 (Halo) component lifecycle and then dive into the Flex 4 (Spark) component lifecycle. We’ll talk about what exactly happens at startup to a Spark component - how its skin gets initialized and associated with the component, how its states are determined, etc. It will be great! In addition to slides and explanations, we’ll walk through building a sample component and introspecting the methods as we discuss them. As usual, I’ll put all the slides and code on my blog after the talk.

Not to plug my last year’s MAX talk, but next week’s presentations will all hinge on having some knowledge of the Flex 3 component lifecycle. So, if you haven’t watched that video, it might behoove you to do so

You can see the video, grab the slides and code all from my blog post here.

Details on the time and location of each talk is on the SILVAFUG and BAADAUG sites.

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Title: Learn About the Flex Component Cycle for Halo and Spark Components

Published:: 17.09.09

Category:: Flex 4, Gumbo, Flex 3, Presentations, Flex

About

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My name is Deepa Subramaniam and I am the Flex SDK Product Manager. Prior to being a Product Manager, I was a Lead Computer Scientist on the Flex team at Adobe. I worked primarily on FXG, data-aware controls, and general Spark and MX architecture design. I am a graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in Computer Science. I am also the author of Adobe Flex 3.0 for Dummies, which you can purchase on Amazon.com and other book retail sites. Aside from Flex, I’m a professionally trained South Indian classical dancer and played on a championship adult kickball team. I live in San Francisco and can be seen biking around and giggling to myself.

Chase Brammer 18.09.09.09 / 11am

I would love to see slides or an audio capture or something of your user group presentation on the Halo comp life cycle!

Twitter Trackbacks for iamdeepa on flex » Blog Archive » Learn About the Flex Component Cycle for Halo and Spark Components [iamdeepa.com] on Topsy.com 18.09.09.09 / 3pm

[…] iamdeepa on flex » Blog Archive » Learn About the Flex Component Cycle for Halo and Spark Componen… iamdeepa.com/blog/?p=43 – view page – cached Folks! Man, its been awhile since I’ve posted. My bad, my bad. At least I have something fun to share! — From the page […]

Andreas Falley 22.09.09.09 / 3am

I wasn’t able to make it like I had hoped. Was this recorded or can you point us to any similar presentation or best link to the topic (besides your presenation of course) to best learn it?

Chris Luebcke 23.09.09.09 / 1pm

Thanks for a great presentation last night, it was extremely informative and for me filled in a lot of the “whys” and best practices for working with the component lifecycle.

I didn’t want to be an attention you-know-what, but I wanted to point out that I think the question about using constants stemmed from an easy-to-overlook fact about metadata (presuming I know what I’m talking about), which is that metadata is read directly by the compiler prior to compilation, so constants (not to mention any other AS variables) are not available. The ubiquitous example of this is in [Event()] metadata tags, which are unable to utilize the event type constants and class references that we always use and rely on in the rest of our code, and are instead defined via hardcoded strings.

Hope that makes sense, and is correct.

Cheers,
Chris

Deepa Subramaniam 30.09.09.09 / 7pm

@Chris, Sorry, been super busy the past few days.

So, I went back and did some investigating. So, if you look in the framework, no-where do we use static constants within metadata. For the [Event] example, we only use constants when creating the event object for dispatching. The metadata just specifies the name of the event and the event object class. Obviously, this isn’t a big thing to support, but would have required compiler work.

Additionally, we don’t yet support constants in MXML. For the particular skin states question, we would have needed to do that. Again, this isn’t a big request, but would have required a modification of the MXML language and corresponding compiler work.

I do love the idea though - if you can, logging an ECR in JIRA would be great.

Thanks!

Abdul Rahim Shariff 11.01.10.10 / 3am

Hi,

I hope you are in good health, and able to answer some of my query.

I like to know if flex 4.0 support the Arabic language, I was reading some about the spark component and came across Text layout engine.
If you can help me out with an example it will be a great help.

Thank you

iamdeepa on flex

Learn About the Flex Component Cycle for Halo and Spark Components

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