Hello list,
I've been meaning to share my experiences porting a decent sized OL
project to SWF recently. Once i got around some pratfalls that weren't
listed on the wiki, i completely enjoy using SWF9 for application
development. All the speed and extra type checking i could hope for, and
i think the team has found a wonderful balance in the transition. That
said, here's the list of things that i needed to know to successfully
port to SWF9 from SWF8 that i'd like to repeat for the list, since i
didn't find it in the "runtime differences" wiki entry on the
openlaszlo.org wiki.
FIRST - if you download the debugger version of SWF9 from adobe's site,
you will be able to see all the runtime errors that i didn't know i
could even trap until after this list was made. Find it, download it,
use it! When i say "bombed silently" below, i mean that i couldn't find
it (without the debugger)
These are random road block I hit that took a lot of time; i hope it
saves someone the same:
- all old style setAttr(val) style calls are changed to
setAttribute(attr, val)
across the whole project
- all methods that are also used for delegates have a single dummy
argument, 'true' passed as as3 requires across the whole project
- found out that for loops in script tags can cause silent infinite
loops, so converted all script tags into nodes with methods across
the whole project. Script tags and SWF9 are not a good combination
- found out that expressions that resolve to *objects* (not object
attributes) in an attribute
must use the "once" constraint type, not the erroneous ${} active
constraint syntax. changed across the whole project
- (a few of the fields that used not to be clickable are all of the
sudden -- need to look into that)
- Used try catch to isolate and report the most egregious of the errors
i encountered (try and catch were not so important when the debugger
caught everything)
- Handlers will also cause the runtime to bomb silently if the
reference attribute is pointed at a nonexistant thing
- If a handler references something
that has not been inited at the time it's evaluated for the first
time, the runtime will bomb silently.
best,
.j
