Comments on: ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns

By: Bill Sanders

Bill Sanders — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:29:12 +0000

Hi Peter,

It’s funny, we get these snipes who seem to follow us around whenever anyone says something good about our book, they say what Mike does–something vague and negative. Then they go on to praise Joey’s & Danny’s book. In effect, they are trying to make it an “Us vs. Them” contest.

This is annoying, but not for the reasons you might think. Chandima and I are truly interested design patterns and ActionScript 3.0 and not some kind of dumb contest. We’re glad more people are taking an interest in ActionScript and design patterns, and as you’ve seen at our blog on design patterns, we have lively discussions about them. (AS DP Blog). We’d love to see Mike and Czebe come out of the closet and join in that discussion rather than the sniping they engage in. It takes focus and energy away from the discussion of ActionScript 3.0 and design patterns.

Bill

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:07:33 +0000

Hi, I found the book useless. I returned it to Borders. The least the authors could have done was, given that the subject matter was covered in GoF book, was give some serious AS 3 examples. I thought the names for the packages, interfaces and classes often muddied the subject matter. The must have explained that AS 3 has no abstract class at least ten times… filler.

The Essential AS 3.0 and AS 3.0 Cookbook are very good. The majority of people who find this book useful must be approaching these patterns for the first time.

By: DenisM

DenisM — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:20:36 +0000

Useful book, thanks a lot

By: czebe

czebe — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:07:53 +0000

Hi, I found the book quite boring and and useless. There’s a certain university textbook feeling to it: explanations and examples are too academic, not suitable for everyday agency/studio flash work. Compare the writing style and examples to Collin Moock’s Essential AS3 book…what a difference!

By: Pete Hobson

Pete Hobson — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 23:53:29 +0000

Hey Peter,

IS there any major differences between this and Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns?

Pete

By: sakri

sakri — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 09:02:49 +0000

Funny Peter, we had this same discussion last week with the dev’s at nascom. We were looking at Cairngorm (the dispatcher and so), and they (as Bill mentioned) thought Singletons were lame. “The pattern implemented for the sake of implementing a design pattern”. The consensus (as Luke already mentioned) is to use static instead.

I’m actually preparing a “design patterns” training for our new recruits, and I too have found Bills book a good resource

By: Bill Sanders

Bill Sanders — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 02:37:14 +0000

The Singleton is a touchy one. At the OOPSLA conference for the last two years, I’ve been informed by my betters that the Singleton is evil, no matter what. Also, with my focus more in State, Strategy and Flyweight dps, I’ve not been doing a lot with the Singleton. Even Erich Gamma said that he wished that they hadn’t included the Singleton in their book.

I worked with the Singleton a lot when we were preparing the book and I wish I had seen Grant Skinner’s solution earlier. However, since I didn’t, I’m glad that it’s been brought up here, and I’ll try it the next time I’m tempted to use the Singleton again.

Chandima and I are working through more design patterns at our blog at http://www.as3dp.com/. After a fitful start on the Flyweight (in 3 installments) I re-did the whole thing and presented it at OOPSLA using an air traffic control example, and it’s in better shape now. (I hope to get it up in the next couple of days.)

Thanks for the insights

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:07:22 +0000

@Luke - ECMA is a cruel mistress, must be kinda fun for the engineers being able to blame all annoyances of the scripting language on it not being implemented by the standard yet

@Phillip - thanks for the suggestion, did exactly that

By: Phillip Kerman

Phillip Kerman — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 17:02:33 +0000

You should consider recycling your post into a review on amazon.com

By: Luke

Luke — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:50:51 +0000

When I need a Singleton in AS3 I usually implement all its methods and properties as static. That way it doesn’t matter if you use an instance (where creating an instance with the new keyword just acts as a getInstance) or target the methods through a class reference with the Class.method() approach.

It is kinda weird that AS2 supported private constructors and I was surprised to see that it wasn’t possible in AS3. I guess AS3 is more conform the ECMA spec.