Nov 3
Thanks to Tronster for today’s guest article! If you’re interested in writing a guest article, e-mail Jackson about your idea.
Natively, Flash does not offer a two-dimensional array type. But, Flash’s one-dimensional Array and various other container types (i.e., Object, Dictionary, and Vector) allow for user-created 2D array solutions. Today’s article explores the performance of various ways to make a 2D array.
Sep 12
One of the advantages of using Dictionary instead of Object when mapping key-value pairs is that you can use whatever type of key you want, not just a String. However, a recent comment points out that the keys are still checked with the loose equality operator (==) and you can therefore get clashes like 4 == "4". For today’s article, I’ve written a TypesafeDictionary class that allows you to overcome this limitation. Read on for the implementation, performance testing, and more.
Aug 29
The Dictionary class provides perhaps the most useful support for weak references—and therefore garbage collection control—in the AS3 Flash API. However, due to a subtle error in its documentation, you may inadvertently be leaking a lot of memory. Today’s article shows you how this can happen and how you can easily fix the leak.
Jul 25
Sometimes you need to map a key to many values, but AS3 has no built-in data structure for this purpose. Dictionary and Object are suitable one-to-one maps, but there’s been no one-to-many support until now. Read on for my own one-to-many class—MultiMap—as well as performance testing and analysis.
May 9
XML is widely used in AS3 applications for everything from simple configuration files to complex networking protocols. AS3 even includes 10 operators in its syntax specifically to make XML easier to work with. This often leads to AS3 developers loading XML documents and then just leaving them as an XML objects. XML’s performance begins to seep into the rest of the AS3 application. Today we look at just how much this can slow down our apps.
Mar 21
AS3 has an interesting feature that is sometimes used to great effect: dynamic classes. These classes can have fields added and removed to them and used like any other field. You can even make your own dynamic classes with the dynamic keyword. However, all of this fancy functionality comes at a steep performance cost. How steep? Read on to see just how steep.
Oct 18
There are three main ways to access the contents of objects in AS3: the dot (.) operator, the index ([]) operator, and the in operator. The first two are well known and functionally-equivalent because obj.property evaluates to the same value as obj["property"]. The in operator is different as I’ve described before: it returns a Boolean indicating whether or not the object has the given property. There are a lot of cases—error checking, for example—where we only care if an object has a property and not what that property is. So, can we improve performance by using the is operator rather than the index or dot operators? (UPDATE: hasOwnProperty results added)
Apr 20
I was reminded about the flash.sampler API by Grant Skinner’s recent post about it. While only available in the debug player, it can still tell us some valuable information about what goes on in the release player. Today I’m using the getSize function to find out how much memory overhead various classes impose, even when they are empty.
