Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide

Component Use

Components are one of the cornerstones of Rich Internet Application (RIA) development using Flash and Flash Remoting. Components make it easy to create rich interfaces, but they can also be responsible for an application getting bogged down with poor performance. Many of the Macromedia user interface components are very code-intensive when it comes to doing things like populating the component, sorting, and adding data. You should be conservative in your use of client-side code when dealing with components. The DataGrid component, for example, can utilize 90-100% of the end user’s system resources while being populated—from a remote service or local data.

Tip

The Flash 2004 component architecture is optimized for applications that use five or six components; the shared library that Flash 2004 components require adds more file size than is justified by using only one or two components.

Component Speed

The speed of a component is often dependent on the type of code you are utilizing. What looks more efficient to the ActionScript programmer is often slower in execution. If you’re in doubt about the speed of a particular section of code, you can time it using the Date( ) object. The code in Example 12-2 is a CodeTimer object, which can be used to time the execution of sections of code.

Example 12-2. The CodeTimer class facilitates easy timing of code

// Constructor accepts an optional message argument and starts the timer function CodeTimer (message) { this.message = message; ...