Round up of ActionScript 3.0 and Flex optimization technique

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Round up of ActionScript 3.0 and Flex optimization technique

Postby rajiv123 » Sat Jul 03, 2010 9:51 pm

A homework assignment I was recently given for a Java programming class involved a competition to see who could create the most optimized implementation of an interface which was provided by the instructor. It was a challenging and very fun assignment that I think the whole class enjoyed. I didn’t win the competition but still came out a winner because of my heightened interest in application optimization and performance tuning that I gained.

I’m personally a pretty big fan of coding standards and have been ribbed by many developers over some of the longer method, variable and class names that I sometimes choose. I've always leaned toward the side of programming that employs standards and frameworks . Rather than spending a ton of time digging around in compiler specs and messing with GC (Garbage Collection) for reasons of performance, tuning and optimization. I was leaving this to the seasoned programmers creating the standards and frameworks I use.

This isn’t to say I’ve never paid attention to performance and I enjoy building slow applications. It’s almost like two different worlds; the optimization world and the standards world. They don’t always agree with each other. There can sometimes be a trade off for performance over readability and organization or vice-versa. This article is meant to stand next to the Flex Best Practices articles that I authored.

While creating my concrete implementation for the homework assignment I discovered a powerful profiling engine in NetBeans. The NetBeans profiling engine helped me understand some of the memory usage and consumption of each property, method call and object instantiation in my program. This profiler in NetBeans is very similar to the one found in Flex Builder. Both are very powerful and very useful. I've been exploring the Flex Profiler in greater detail lately as well and using it to eradicate memory leaks for a real world application I’ve been refactoring to best practices lately.

The Java optimization homework has increased my interest in optimization and profiling for ActionScript 3.0 and Flex development. I've been piecing together ActionScript optimization techniques and practices from around the web for a couple years now. Some of these techniques are in opposition to what the standards dictate but most of software development is this way. You have to learn when to use some techniques and when to leave some out.

Here is a round up of ActionScript 3.0 and Flex optimization techniques and practices. I’ve scoured the web for and filtered practices and techniques that can be adopted into your application development process.
rajiv123
 
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