This is the third post in an occasional series designed to bridge the gap between ActionScript 3.0 and emerging front-end technologies. Both ActionScript and the front-end stack have mechanisms for sending data from a page or movie to a server without requiring a page refresh. In most browsers, we can use the XMLHttpRequest object. In [...] [Posted: 31 Oct 2011]
My super-short post that attempts to answer this question as completely and accurately as possible in three presentation-friendly bullet points. HTML5 … re-imagines HTML as an API with objects, events, interfaces, and methods or a collection of interfaces. defines an algorithm for generating a consistent, cross-browser friendly DOM tree, regardless of the quality of the [...] [Posted: 26 Oct 2011]
JavaScript has a native method for executing a function periodically: setInterval. But in PHP, it’s a little bit harder. PHP lacks a setInterval equivalent. The closest we can get are the sleep(), usleep(), and time_nanosleep() functions. These functions delay script execution by a certain period of time (either seconds, microseconds, or a combination or seconds [...] [Posted: 25 Oct 2011]
Peter-Paul Koch writes: Google wants to create a new language for the web. That idea will have to be accepted by all other browser vendors. Nowadays that doesn’t just mean Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, and Opera, but also Nokia, Samsung, RIM, and a host of minor ones. Why would they do as Google tells them? That’s [...] [Posted: 12 Oct 2011]
Apparently while I wasn’t paying attention, the big four browser vendors (more or less) implemented DOM Level 3 events. And what, exactly, is the big deal about DOM Level 3? Custom DOM events. Custom events are especially important in game development. Let’s say we were developing Pong using JavaScript. We might fire a bounce event [...] [Posted: 12 Oct 2011]
This is the second post in an occasional series designed to bridge the gap between ActionScript 3.0 and emerging front-end technologies. Flash, like JavaScript, more-or-less adheres to a same-origin policy by default. Under a same-origin policy, requests for data must come from the same scheme, hostname, and port. If http://foo.example tries to request data from [...] [Posted: 10 Oct 2011]
To date, Firefox does not yet support the loop attribute of the <video> element. This snippet is a simple work-around. Once the video’s ended event is fired, it calls the play method. For more, consult the media events section of the HTML5 specification. [Posted: 4 Oct 2011]
During my three years at Armchair, I worked on a few ActionScript 3.0 projects. I knew some ActionScript 2.0 when I started, but ActionScript 3.0 was new for me. It is object-oriented and requires event-driven thinking — two skills frankly, that I am still developing. They’re also two skills you should be developing, as they’re [...] [Posted: 3 Oct 2011]