Posts Tagged think in colour
My second Rich Internet Application
Posted by zedia.net in ActionScript 3 on December 1st, 2008
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:
- TweenLite
- PureMVC
- SWFAddress
- SWFObject
- 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!
Show your support for PureMVC; Donate a click!
If you use PureMVC and you like it I suggest you head to insideRIA and vote for it on this week poll. I have multiple reasons to ask you to do this.
First off I think it’s a great project and it deserves the attention. More attention means more people might start using it and might get involved which can only be good for the project.
Also, we started using PureMVC on 3 different projects (one being HomeDepot – redefining floors) and I use it in a personal project and I really like it. I developed some skills with it and if PureMVC does well, those skills are going to be more valuable. Also, the people at my jobs might not be so happy if in the near future PureMVC would just crumble (which I don’t think could happen), I would have made them invest expertise in something that would have been shortermed.
Lastly, PureMVC is one off the few framework that support both Flash or Flex based project and that is really important for me; so go ahead, give PureMVC some love.
My first RIA
Two weeks ago we launched a website that I am real proud of: Home Depot Think in Colour. It was the first RIA that I programmed (if you don’t count my favicon editor) and man did I sweat doing it.
First, it was way bigger than I first thought because applications have way more possibilities to break than normal websites. I never thought this would take as much quality insurance as it did, every time we would think it was done, someone would find a bug. Another thing I didn’t foresee was all the Event managing and making sure every part of the application was getting the right message at the right time. Now I really understand what a framework like PureMVC can do for you, plus the nice features you can add that are not so hard to implement like undos.
Second we also had a lot of trouble with the hosting. We are not the main agency for Home Depot Canada, so we once we were done with our files, we had to hand them over to the other agency and they really screwed up. I won’t list every thing that is not working properly, but I list this one, the back button was supposed to work to some extent, but now it doesn’t… for no reason. I knew there would be complications from having two agencies working together, but I didn’t think there would be so much.
All in all, we came up with a really nice product, actually the website I’m the most proud of to this date. So get out there, and start Thinking in Colour!
