We just returned from a wonderful two-week excursion to South Africa and now that I can no longer swing from trees (albeit with a harness) in Tsitsikamma or fling myself from a cliff (albeit with a rope) in Knysna, I've returned to the less life-threathening pursuits of my never-ending quest for best practices Flash and Flex development! And with that, here's my article for today, which I just posted to the Flex forums at the London Macromedia User Group:

Finding a suitable onLoad() replacement for Flex forms.

Emilie and I are leaving for a three week trip to South Africa today and, of course, my notebook's hard-drive picks this day to die! All I can say is thank goodness for backups, source control and VPN!.. the poor thing is already booked in at the repair shop in Cape Town for tomorrow so hopefully it will make a full recovery before my MMUG presentation next week!

Aside from my talk at the MMUG and the three-day workshop I'm planning to use the time to finalize the roadmap for our newly open-sourced Ariaware RIA Platform. The first update, it appears, will be a Flash Communication Server service module for ARP, which we will be releasing shortly with aYo Binitie. You can catch a preview of it at aYo's talks on best-practices pattern-based RIA development with Flash and Flash Communication Server on Tuesday at IBM Bedfont Lakes.

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I'm going to be leaving for South Africa on Thursday and it's just been confirmed that I'll be presenting my Best Practices Flash Development talk at the MMUG in Cape Town, South Africa on November 18, 2004. Come on down for 90 minutes of best practices Flash, ActionScript 2 and Design Patterns!

You can get more details from the MMUG SA Cape Town Chapter's web site.

Just a heads up to those of you in SA planning to attend my Best Practices Flash Development workshop in Cape Town: The dates have been changed to November 22-24, 2004.

I just responded to a thread on Ultrashock wherein one of our members was confused as to how Ariaware Optimizer works so I thought a simple explanation with an example might make it clearer. Here goes:

Flash compiles your AS classes into bytecode (instructions that the Flash player can read and understand) and places this bytecode inside your SWF file.

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