Picture by Marc Liyanage

It’s been surprisingly fun (I give credits to the beer sponsored by Nemos). People even managed to pretend they’d be interested in what I was prosing, so credit to them too!

I’d also like to mention that there’ll be the swiss flash event soon: Flash at the Lake will not only pamper you with appearances of great national and international Flash enthustiacs, it will also give anybody attending the pleasure to enjoy one of Zurich’s greatest locations with people who don’t think of you as a storm lightning adorer when you sit in the sun twittering Flash into the clear lake. And all that to a fantastic price. Check it out at fatl.ch

So here we go with the presentation (Quicktime so you can enjoy the marvelous effects):

Related posts:

1. Flash Player 10 – I love speed

Let’s take the simplest parsing as an example. Converting a CSS like string “width: 100%; maxwidth: 500; fontface: Bold; gap: 10;” to an object { width: “100%” , maxwidth: “500″ , fontface: “Bold” , gap: “10″ }

Compare these two methods to achieve this:

public static function simpleStringToObject_fast( input : String , o : Object = null ) : Object {
	if ( input == null || !Boolean(input) ) return o;
	if ( o == null ) o = {};
 
	var cursor : int = 0;
	var found_key : String;
	var index : int;
	while ( true ) {
 
		if ( found_key == null ) {
			index = input.indexOf( ':' , cursor );
			if ( index >= 0 ) {
				while( input.charAt(index-1) == ' ' ) index--;
				found_key = input.substring( cursor , index );
				cursor = index + 1;
				while( input.charAt(cursor) == ' ' ) cursor++;
			} else {
				break;
			}
		} else {
			index = input.indexOf( ';' , cursor );
			if ( index >= 0 ) {
				while( input.charAt(index-1) == ' ' ) index--;
				o[ found_key ] = input.substring( cursor , index );
				found_key = null;
				cursor = index + 1;
				while( input.charAt(cursor) == ' ' ) cursor++;
			} else {
				o[ found_key ] = input.substr( cursor );
				break;
			}
		}
	}
 
	return o;
}
 
public static function simpleStringToObject_slow( input : String , o : Object = null ) : Object {
	if ( input == null || !Boolean(input) ) return o;
	if ( o == null ) o = {};
 
	input = input.split(' ').join(''); // remove spaces
	var a : Array = input.split(';');
	var pair : Array;
	for ( var i:int=0 ; i 1 ) {
			o[ pair[0] ] = pair[1];
		}
	}
	return o;
}

The first one might look like some crap lacking any elegance and style, but it’s twice as fast as the second one! And hey, if you do this a million times, it can be 5 seconds instead of 10. Might not seem to be that much, but I think it’s certainly worth the extra coding :-)

(Update: I haven’t mentioned RegExp here, though it definitely deserves a mention. Thing is that Regular Expressions are just damned slow in Flash compared to String manipulations, especially with longer strings. This is kind of surprising because it’s implemented natively. But the implementation obviously isn’t too good performance wise. I hope to see improvements with F10, though haven’t read anything about it yet – and also haven’t tested yet with beta. This little article confirms my experience with RegExp: With a file of 10,000 lines, the string version is still instantaneous, but the regular expression version takes about five seconds. Even with 180,000 lines, the string version is immediate. We gave up on the regular expression version after over five minutes..)

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1. Binary Fun – Bits in Bed with Actionscript
2. Nested inner functions can be evil
3. Metatunnel 1k Demo: AS vs. JS