ActionScript 3 Design Patterns

ActionScript 3.0 Protection Proxy Design Pattern 2: The FCNY Meeting

William B. Sanders — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:01:23 +0000

On June 30, 2010 I met with the Flash Coders New York (FCNY). I walked over to the meeting site from Grand Central Station—it’s a straight shot up Park Ave., dogleg at Broadway and Bob’s your uncle! It’s right there near 4th on Mercer in a joint called Think Coffee. (East Village area near NYU.) [...]

Meet in NYC on June 30, 2010

William B. Sanders — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:05:17 +0000

I’ll be at the Flash Coders New York (FCNY) weekly meeting at Think Coffee, 248 Mercer St. (NYC) on Wednesday, June 30 (Time: 7-9pm) to talk about ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns. The plan is to look at some of the fundamental principles of design patterns and implementations with ActionScript 3.0. The Protection Proxy used in [...]

ActionScript 3.0 Protection Proxy Design Pattern 1: Shielding the Real Subject

William B. Sanders — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 01:08:01 +0000

he images that people use on dating sites may not exactly represent who they are. So instead of putting in a real picture, they may use a proxy that is better looking, younger (or older), and generally more likely to attract a date. The Proxy Design Pattern deals with object access. In our book, we [...]

ActionScript 3.0 Lazy Initialization and the Factory Method Design Pattern

William B. Sanders — Tue, 25 May 2010 04:04:17 +0000

he other day I was re-reading Chandima’s description of key OOP concepts used in the Factory Method design pattern. It is beautifully encapsulated in a little over a half a page (page 84). The Factory Method allows you to separate the creation of objects from their use. It says a bit more, but it is [...]

Recursion vs. Iteration: Elegance or Speed?

William B. Sanders — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:54:32 +0000

Repeated operations are handled either by recursion or loops (iteration). One of the fundamental structures of programming is loops, and we programmers tend to think, If I need to repeat an operation, I use a loop. Loops are built-in structures of most languages, and ActionScript 3.0 has multiple options when it comes to loops. ActionScript [...]

ActionScript 3.0 Skip Lists 2: Making and Searching

William B. Sanders — Sat, 15 May 2010 09:45:58 +0000

This post culminates what has amounted to a marathon of posts about skip lists. This whole project started because Timo had mentioned that one of the design patterns would benefit from the inclusion of skip lists, but he never said how or how to create them. Since I’d never head of skip lists I [...]

ActionScript 3.0 Skip Lists 1: The Quickest Route Home

William B. Sanders — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:16:37 +0000

Living in Bloomfield, Connecticut, I’m about halfway between Boston and New York City. Lately they’ve been talking about building a high speed rail to Hartford and on to Springfield, Massachusetts. Naturally, when thinking about such a rail system, I like to think that the really fast part of the trip would be between New York [...]

ActionScript 3.0 Recursive Binary Search: The Vice!

William B. Sanders — Sat, 08 May 2010 14:37:38 +0000

The Recursive Vice After our post on the binary search algorithm, I found that no one had cooked up an example of a Recursive Binary Search. So, I did. In a recent post, we looked at linked lists and used a recursive algorithm to move through the list. The algorithm is simple, and I hope explains [...]

ActionScript 3.0 Linked Lists: The Road to Skip Lists

William B. Sanders — Fri, 07 May 2010 14:29:59 +0000

Recursive Linked List To understand Skip Lists we need to understand Linked Lists. Linked lists are nothing new to programming, dating back to the early days of digital computing in the 1950’s. I found an old Macromedia DevNet article by Branden Hall on creating linked lists in an earlier version of ActionScript. So while nothing [...]

A Funny Thing Happened on the way to Skip Lists: The ActionScript 3.0 Binary Search Algorithm

William B. Sanders — Wed, 05 May 2010 14:58:54 +0000

A while back a comment by Timo Hannelin suggested that I use a skip list in one of the design patterns. (I looked but couldn’t find the comment, but I remember it was a good idea.) Anyway, I read the original article on skip lists by William Pugh. After reading the article and [...]