I did some speed tests today, comparing two string parsing methods. And I’ve made some very interesting discoveries: The execution speed between SWF compiled for debugging and those compiled without differs.

Ha! Okay, that’s not that much of news (even for me). But what astonishes me is how much this speed gap can be, especially when it comes to massive data calculations. I somehow always had a somewhat 20 percent speed decrease in mind (I was just presuming, me dumb). But for a 3d particle test we’re talking factor 8!!

Now this made me curious… so I’ve tested with Debug and Release Player both debug and release SWFs:

Debug Player running Debug SWF

Debug Player running Release SWF

Release Player running Debug SWF

Release Player running Release SWF

A few conclusions:

• Never release a SWF file with debug code (or otherwise said: put only stuff online from bin-release, never bin-debug). Though common users won’t notice the speed decrease, your friendly flash developers may, at least if you’re app is somewhat cpu intensive. And of course: debug SWF are much bigger in size (just in case you give a fuck about flash devs ;-)
• Speed tests should be played in the release player. Why? After all, I wouldn’t care if the relation would stay the same. Usually you just need to know how much faster one thing is compared to the other one, so that would do it. But unfortunately the ratio won’t always be the same. In the above example the ration is 3.66 for debug and 2.92 for release. And it can differ muuuuch more.

The last one bugs me quite a bit. It’s just a pain in the ass to export a release build each time you wanna compare performance. And it also means you can’t do quick’n'dirty trace outputs for the time result (not a biggy if you’re testing within a Flex project though).

So here we go with two wishes for Adobe:

• Let us quickly test release builds within Flex Builder (a simple command would do it – I thought it might be «Run Testapp» (instead of «Debug Testapp»), but that just doesn’t bring up the Debugger (and same speed)
• An option to turn off debugging mode in Debug Player!!! That would solve almost all problems, and we could also use our Plugin for normal browsing without performance penalties (is this why Youtube eats so much cpu here?

There’s still quite a gap between Flash and Flex – while Flash is great for creating animations, vector symbols and just keeping little assets within one place, Flex Builder is so very much better for anything code. So how to link those two together?

Though I’ve written some posts about how to code within Flex Builder and compile from there using Flash IDE, I personally don’t like that at all and only use it for some few older AS3 projects. There are better methods, ways to compile from within Flex Builder while still being able to make use of Flash comfort.

There’s a neat way to embed a library without loosing any functionality (like little scripts). I’ve first seen it at Grant Skinner (who’s doing great stuff, one of my favorites in the flash community really). Let’s say, you have a assets.fla and a published assets.swf. Now here we go: (more…)

Most of the Flash application deal with server side data like images, xml files etc. We tend to forget about that because the default Run or Debug commands in Flex will open a local html file (and also because we developers often have quite a nice internet connection when testing remotely). Thus all data is loaded nearly instantely.

In Flash we have a menu command called «Simulate Download» to see how things run at different bandwidth situations. But how to achieve this in Flex?

I’ve been using Sloppy for a long time. It’s little java app that can be started via a simple web click. It’s really easy to use and does very well what it does. For debugging your app (your flash website) throttled in Flex Builder simply follow these steps:

1. Open the Sloppy website
2. Click the little Sloppy icon:
   
   
3. A «sloppy.jnlp» file is downloaded. Open it if doesn’t open automatically.
4. The actual application will be downloaded and started. If it asks you to trust: trust! :-)
5. Enter the address of your html file in the bin-debug or bin-release folder. It should be a webserver address. I usually create a symbolic link of my project directory and put it into my local webserver directory.
   
6. Click «Go» – this will start the Sloppy proxy and open the page in your default browser. 
7. Copy the address from the browser window (usually http://127.0.0.1:7569/your/path)
   
8. You may close the window. Go to Flex Builder and open the project properties (right click on project folder, last item). In an Actionscript Project, switch to ActionScript Build Path.
    
9. Enter the copied address into «Output folder URL», clear the html name (e.g. App.html).
   
10. Click «OK» and you’re done. You can now Run and Debug as if your website was hosted on some server and you had a 256K ADSL connection (instead of your T1).

Note: I tried to automate the whole thing (with Ant of course) and succeeded to a certain limit. What I did was download Sloopy’s source code (java), modify it so it can handle more terminal attributes and build the  .jar file. This can be run on command line, which will start the sloopy server. So I created an ant file that does all that for me, but this ant file would only be cool, if it could also trigger the run or debug commands and modify the output folder url. I haven’t found a way (at least not a satisfying one) to do this, so I might just follow the manual street for once ;)

Another note: If you are windows user, you might wanna try this Firefox plugin: Firefox Throttle

I figured a much much easier (compared to this) way to trigger Test Movie in Flash IDE from within Flex. What you’ll still need is Ant (here’s how to install), but that’s all you gonna need apart from Flex Builder and Flash. That’s the simplest ant build file to achieve this:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="Publish" default="Publish" basedir="./">
	<!-- project specifics -->
	<target name="Publish">
		<concat destfile="build.jsfl">
			fl.getDocumentDOM().testMovie();
		</concat>
		<exec executable="open" failonerror="true" logerror="true">
			<arg line="build.jsfl" />
		</exec>
		<delete file="build.jsfl" />
	</target>
</project>

This tests the frontmost document in Flash IDE. (basically what does this plugin). Tested on Mac OS X 10.5.5 with Flex Builder Pro 3.0.2 and Flash CS4.

No need for FlashCommand. No need to alter the file for other projects. Just a super easy file for people with not too many requirements.

You can still go more advanced with something like that:
(more…)

Update: I’ve found an easier way without FlashCommand

Once you got used to developing for Flash in Flex Builder, you hate to do any programming in Flash IDE. Still you sometimes might have to: Flex Builder won’t allow to publish into a FLA file. (There are of course many other reasons, like supporting older AS1/AS2 projects, we don’t go into that here.) Thanks to Eclipse’s ability to be customized, there are ways to make things at least a little easier. I give here a little overview of how I’ve set up my environment, based on several helpful resources I’ve found in the web.

1. Install FlashCommand
2. Install Ant

And for each project:

1. Create/modify Ant file
2. Create Actionscript project
3. Set up project and FLA file

(more…)

I did a lot of string parsing in the recent time: CSS Selectors, XML Display Objects, Stylesheets, … I also need XML selection from String expressions – I formerly (AS2) used the great XPath4AS2 from XFactorStudio which did it’s job well (though a bit slow, it’s AS2 after all).

There’s also one for Actionscript 3 (xpath-as3). But.. well… I wanted to go for some real speed! I like XPath a lot, but we now have native E4X selection in Actionscript 3, quite a different concept of node selection, and the conversion of XPath to E4X obviously results in quite a compromise in performance.

So all I need is a decent E4X parser. And hey, I found one! E4XParser from Digital Primates. It does its job really well, especially considering the very compact code it consists of. Thanks to some preparsing and caching, it’s also quite fast.

Still I thought I can do better :-) So I planted myself for a day (and a night) in front of my displays and hacked the hell out of it. The result is a little library which does pretty much the same thing as E4XParser, though pretty much more and a little faster too (15% to 50%). It’s about half as fast as the native E4X selection (once parsed). You can do nearly anything you can do with E4X. Use it like this:

import com.betabong.xml.e4x.E4X;
var result : XMLList = E4X.evaluate( xmllist , "author.( name.@last == 'Jobs' )" );
 
// E4X.evaluate( source : XMLList , expression : String ) : XMLList

 
If your source is XML, just do XMLList( xml ), if your result should be xml, do xml = result[0]

Test it here

Restrictions: You can’t use AND/OR in comparisions. So, this won’t go: author.( name.@first == ‘Steve’ && name.@last == ‘Jobs’ ) – though this is only a real limitations for OR. do this for AND: author.( name.@first == ‘Steve’ ).( name.@last == ‘Jobs’ ).

What you can do: Yes, you can do quite advanced stuff like author.( name.@first == name.@last ) or car.@rating.average() (one of the few proprietary functions I added). Or even

*..car.( @brand.toLowerCase() == 'volvo' ).( parent().( localName() == 'group' ).@rating > @rating )

– a weird example, I admit, but fancy, ain’t it? :-)

This is the first time ever I’m releasing part of my library as Open Source (MIT licence). As soon as I’ll find some time (and if I see any interest), I’m gonna put this into Google Code, so everybody can easily checkout and participate. Until then download it from here:

Download (zip 13kb)

Sometimes it would be quite comfortable (from a programmer’s perspective) to use nested inner functions. But they are a potential source for nasty problems. Let’s take the following simple scenario: (more…)

I like to keep all my projects on a svn server. So far this was just for myself and I didn’t care much about the simplicity of checking out and in – a little chaos is acceptable if you’re up to handle it ;)

Finally I was forced to rethink this strategy because I wanted to let other people work on a project. As many actionscript projects, this one also heavily relies on external libraries, most of them hosted by Google Code, another one being my own (closed) lib. So should I tell people: «hey, just svn checkout from here and there and then relink the libs in the project properties but don’t check in the updated settings for christ’s sake!»No. Too shaky, really.

Fortunately, SVN provides a fucking cool way to solve this issue: svn:externals. (more…)