Design Patterns in Actionscript 3

Design Patterns are proven methods of organizing your code so your application becomes easier to maintain and expand. This presentation was packed at the start but people kept leaving the room and for a good reason.

If you build Flash applications for a living and don't know what Design Patterns are or how to apply them, I highly recommend getting a good introductory book such as "Head First Design Patterns". The bigger your application is, the more you will gain from knowing about Patterns. They're not a complete solution for how to build applications, but they a great guide to structuring smaller and larger parts of your code.

How does that relate to this presentation? Design patterns is all about structure and this presentation suffered from a serious lack of structure. The two guys on stage started out well, but it soon became apparent that they had not practiced this too well. They argued against each other on stage, pointed out errors in the code they presented, had hardware problems and probably tried to compensate for this by being "uber-cool" something that one really should not do while presenting to an audience you don't know. My guess is that several in the crowd already knew quite a bit about Design Patterns so playing cool and knowledgeable to such a crowd totally failed.

After attending such a messy presentation, it was refreshing to go up to the MAXUP conference and see some of the cool stuff Robert M. Hall have done with Flash and robotics. His speech was far better structured and showed several of the hardware kits you can control using Flash. I only got the last bit of his presentation, but I know that he showed several kits from Teleo and even talked about the new LEGO Mindstorms kit.

About Jens C Brynildsen

Jens has been working with Flash since version 3 came out. Since then, he's been an active member of the Flash community. He's created more than a hundred Flash games (thus the name of his blog) but he also creates web/standalone applications, does workshops and other consulting. He loves playing with new technology and he is convinced that the moment you stop learning you die (creatively speaking). Jens is also the Editor of this website.

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