The Flex community is an amazing, thriving ecosystem of developers, solutions, open-source code, libraries and frameworks, and technical blogs. When I review a public or open-source AS3 library, often the API has been created only for th AS3 programmer… as such it is intended to be used programmatically.[1] Unfortunately, most API developers neglect to consider how their API can be used in the declarative form (Declarative forms are used as “tags” in HTML and MXML classes). This article could have also been titled “The amazing benefits of Declarative Programming!”...

For over 5 years, I have been a Cairngorm proponent and evangelist. During the last 6 months I have discovered a new framework passion called “Swiz.” Inversion of control, metadata processors, dependency injection… these are just some of the amazing features available in the Swiz framework. With the release of Swiz 1.0rc1, several developers asked questions regarding the best way to use the BabelFx Framework (aka l10nInjection) to add multi-language features to Swiz RIA applications. So here is the modified version of the Swiz Flex 4 CafeTownsend application… now with...

Christophe Coenraets published a Flex4 update to the classic FlexStore application in his recent blog FlexStore Revisited. The Phone catalog data is actually loaded from an external XML file and a Filter bar allows users “quick filters” for rapid browsing. In the Flex 4 SDK version, he demonstrated the use of tile layouts and Spark DataGroups and experimented with cool hover effects in the “store” catalog display. I will to demonstrate how easy it is to use the BabelFx framework (aka l10nInjection) to add multi-language ( l10n ) support to his FlexStore4 application. It...

In a previous article, I blogged about Flex i18n[1] and an “Inversion of Control” (IOC) approach to radically simplify localization issues within your Flex solutions. That article discussed the issues with the current, traditional localization implementations [used in Flex applications] and then presented the new LocalizationMap solution. In this Part 2 on Flex l10n solutions, I offer a video tutorial, a demo of a Registration application localized to support Spanish and English, and an architecture diagram of LocalizationMap usages. Also included with the live Flex demo is source...

At some point, Flash and Flex developers encounter the issues of modifying a Flex/Flash rich internet application (RIA) to support another language and accomodate software changes for specific cultural preferences. This article focuses on localization of Flash solutions implemented with Flex 3 or Flex 4. Both Flash CS4 and the Flex frameworks provide localization tools and programmatic support features for Flash applications and widgets. Unfortunately the support for localization differs significantly between the toolsets and frameworks offered. Internationalization (i18n)[1] is the process of...