Kalen Gibbons

With Black Friday quickly approaching everyone is in the mood for a deal. Well… Udemy has one for you. For a limited time only, you can get the ColdBox Platform Developer Week course for 45% percent off, by using the coupon code “BLACKFRIDAY”. But time is of the essence, the discounted percent decreases by 3% each day, ending on Friday at 30%.

In addition to this, Udemy has the ability to give courses as gifts. Have you been trying to get a colleague to learn ColdBox, or do you have an employee that could use a boost? Udemy gifting is a great way to spread some knowledge and some Christmas cheer; and at 45% off the timing couldn’t be better.

Hurray! I’m pleased to announce that I am now the Documentation Manager for the ColdBox platform. That means that over the next few months I’ll be doing my best to improve the quality of the already amazing documentation for the platform.

I’m excited to be a part of the ColdBox team and the future of this outstanding platform. If anybody has comments or suggestions about the docs please let me know; I’m very open to receiving feedback.

Thanks.

I’ve decided to write a short blog series on ActionScript design patterns. This series will NOT contain in-depth discussions about the patterns, when to use them, why to use them, or any of that. Rather, each post will have a working example that demonstrates a pattern in use, and will be accompanied by a brief description of key points. These working samples may serve as a functional reference for myself or anyone else who may find them useful. Enjoy.

The Singleton Pattern

The Singleton Pattern is a very commonly used pattern in ActionScript; Cairngorm’s ModelLocator is one of the most popular examples that people may be familiar with. In short, a Singleton is used when you want to guarantee that only one instance of a class can exist.

Why would you want this? Well, to avoid conflicts for one. Imagine you have an application with a shopping cart, and various items can be added to the cart from different sections of your application. You’d typically want all a user’s products in a single shopping cart. If multiple carts existed each would have their its products, its own total, and it would be difficult (and problematic) to manage them all at checkout. So how could you ensure that only one shopping cart exists, especially if you have multiple developers working on the different sections of the application? The answer is to make the shopping cart class a Singleton, which ensures that only a single instance of the Singleton class can exist.

The Code

So, how can the Singleton pattern ensure that only one instance of a class exists? Simple, limit access to the class’ constructor and require the class to instantiate itself. This is typically done with a private constructor in other languages, but ECMAScript, the current standard that ActionScript 3.0 is based on, does not support private constructors. So instead, we create a class like the following:

1. Prohibit constructor access: The easiest way to prevent access to a class’ constructor is to require a parameter that only the class itself has access to. In the example, the SingletonEnforcer class is declared in such a way that it cannot be accessed by any class other than ShoppingCart. Then, by requiring the SingletonEnforcer class to be passed into its constructor, the ShoppingCart class ensures that it cannot be instantiated by anything else; it’s responsible for it’s own creation.
2. Provide a single entry point: Since Singleton classes cannot be instantiated directly, there needs to be an entry point for external classes to request an instance. The getInstance() method serves this purpose. It must be a static method for it to be exposed without requiring an existing instance of the class. This method simply checks to see if an internal instance exists (stored as the instance variable), creates an instance if not, and then returns that single instance.

The Sample

And here’s a working example, you can view the source code here.

And that’s it. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.

I decided to take a look at SpiceFactory’s Parsely framework for Flex, and I was pretty impressed. When I started to dig into the framework I discovered that although the framework’s documentation was very good, there weren’t many community examples or tutorials for the framework. So I decided to create a short series on getting started with Parsley. The examples in the series will be fairly simple and no advanced topics will be discussed; my aim is to help developers get a jump-start on development, by providing simple examples of working code.

Defining Object Dependencies

We’ll begin by learning how to add dependency injection into an application. First, we need to recognize our object dependencies. In the sample application below, the ContactList view requires the ContactManager model object to provide its data. In Parsley, marking that dependency as an injection point is as simple as adding the [Inject] metadata tag above the property declaration.

Parsley can also inject properties into constructors and other methods, and you can find more information on that here.

Creating the IOC Container

Next, we need to tell Parsley where to find the ContactManager class before it can inject it into the view. To do this, we need to add it to the IOC Container, which is responsible for wiring all our dependencies together. The container can be written as MXML, ActionScript, XML, or a combination of the three. For more information on using these methods you can view the documentation here. For this example, we will look at an MXML configuration. To do this, simply create an MXML file with mx:Object as the root tag, and add references to the objects that we will need to wire, like so:

Wiring the View

The framework won’t know to look in our ContactList view for injection points unless we tell it to. To do this, we need to also add the view into the IOC Container. There are two ways of doing this. We could explicitly declare it in the container like we did in the previous step for the ContactManager. But for views, Parsley allows us to dynamically wire them by simply dispatching a single configuration event like so:

The configureView event tells Parsley that the view should be added to the IOC Container at runtime.

Initializing the Framework

Finally, to put it all together, we need to initialize the framework and provide Parsley with the IOC Container we created. We want to do this as early as possible so doing this on the addedToStage event is common practice. Simply call the FlexContextBuilder.build() method and provide the IOC Container and the root DisplayObject used for wiring (typically the application root).

Here is a working example of the code. The application is very simple; when you click the button it simply populates the ContactModel object with data, which is bound to the DataGrid. The key is to notice how the ContactModel has successfully been injected into the view.

You can view the source code here.

Points to Remember

• Dependency injection takes time, and your objects might not be immediately available. In your views, even after the creationComplete event, your objects may still be null. So what you need to do is use [Init] metadata to designate a function for Parsley to run after injection is complete. Using this instead of a Flex event will ensure that your objects are all available and ready for use.
• Don’t forget to add the application root to the IOC Container, if necessary. Even though you may initialize the framework in the application root, and use it as the view root of the Context, you will still need to dispatch the configureView event if you need dependency injection to take place in the application root.

Conclusion

If you haven’t done so already, please read the Parsley Documentation for more information about dependency injection and the Parsley framework. And like I stated in the intro, I’m new to Parsley myself so if anyone would like make corrections or suggest any best practices, please feel free to do so in the comments.

The actual duration, in milliseconds, of jQuery’s predefined effect speeds is not well documented. The possible value are: “slow”, “normal”, or “fast”, but what does that mean? I had to dig into the source code to find out.