About Me

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Flex 3, ActionScript 3, LaTeX

Spent the last two days working on some Adobe Flex 3 and ActionScript 3 goodness. Been porting the BlueMesh GUI that I had made for my Part Four Project from pure ActionScript 2 to ActionScript 3 and MXML. The use of MXML has definitely cut down on development time for the font end stuff (GUI). It has taken only two days to get the GUI ported from work that had taken at least 5 months to sort out. If only were able to use Adobe Flash Player 9 then maybe we would have had a kick arse relational editor (BlueMesh). The port has quite a bit of ActionScript but it's mainly for testing out popups and alert boxes. No more need for JavaScript calls! Everything is nicely contained in the MXML file. Still haven't tried passing in external variable values into the Flash application though. It should follow similarly to ActionScript 2. You use FlashVars to pass values in the application.

Also installed TexLive on my Xubuntu installation so I could have a play around with LaTeX. Will have to use it to create future reports. I guess you wouldn't call LaTeX a "document programming language". Rather it's more like a "document description language" (DDL) because you describe the structure of your intended document but the actual implementation of the document (in DVI, PS or PDF) is at the mercy of the LaTeX compiler you choose to use.

Hmm shouldn't be long before I can try some VHDL or Verilog and play around with FPGAs. Hopefully Xilinx ones. Still want to try and play around with Simulink on MatLAB. Wonder how the function block idea will be like compared to other "function block" design languages say, FBDK.

0 comments: