zedia flash blog » CMA awards http://www.zedia.net Flash, ActionScript, SEO and everything in between Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:58:56 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 My second Rich Internet Application http://www.zedia.net/2008/my-second-rich-internet-application/ http://www.zedia.net/2008/my-second-rich-internet-application/#comments Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:54:07 +0000 zedia.net http://www.zedia.net/2008/my-second-rich-internet-application/ A month ago (October 15th 2008) was the release of Flash player 10, but it was also the week that my second rich internet application was set (a)live. I wanted to make a post about it for a long time but I had a lot going on and only just now have things slowed down. So I present you Home Depot – redefining floors. I am really proud of it and I really put a lot of energy in it. It is the legitimate big brother of the previous RIA I made Home Depot – think in colour. I had known for a little while that I would be doing a follow up application to the paint picker and I had started planning and building the application in my head. When the development began, I knew a lot of things that I would not be doing again. Some of the pitfalls that I had faced doing the first application would not show up this time; I was ready and awaiting this new challenge with the motivation to do something better.

In the first one I had jumped head first into the code because I didn’t see any reason why I would use a framework, it was ok at first, but when the codebase became more imposing, dispatching event also became very tedious. So this time around, I used the framework PureMVC and I can say it helped a lot; it helped with the events and it also helped with shaping my ideas into classes.

An other thing I did differently was that I made sure that my ActionScript classes wouldn’t have displayed text in it. I live in Montreal and we speak mostly French here but the rest of Canada speaks English. So if I start putting copy in my code, I will need to have a codebase for French and a codebase for English. That is what I had done for the first application and every time a modification had to be done I had a whole lot of files to touch. So this time around most of the text was located in an xml file which was something better.

All in all, it was a very nice project that I liked to do a lot and seeing how its little brother got rewarded last Friday (Home Depot – think in colour won a Bronze CMA award  in the retailing category on November 28th 2008) I foresee a bright future for this one too.

Here is a couple more libraries I have been using for this project:

  1. TweenLite
  2. PureMVC
  3. SWFAddress
  4. SWFObject
  5. Alcon (for tracing SWFAddress stuff)

I have a couple of new ideas how to improve my workflow and tools for my next RIA; can’t wait to get my hands dirty!

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