RegExr is an online tool for editing and testing Regular Expressions (RegExp / RegEx). It provides a simple interface to enter RegEx expressions, and visualize matches in real-time editable source text. It also provides a handy RegExp snippet sidebar with descriptions and usage examples to make it easier to learn Regular Expressions through trial and error.

It isn’t as powerful as a product like RegExBuddy, but it has the advantage of being online and free. I will be releasing a free desktop version for Mac OSX and Windows built with AIR in the next day or two.

So far this has only taken a day of development, and the main app is only 150 lines of code. Flex 3 makes this kind of app so darn simple to put together.

RegExr is built with Flex 3, and uses ActionScript 3’s built in RegExp engine. As with most engines, the AS3 RegExp implementation isn’t perfect, so you are likely to encounter some limitations and oddities. Likewise, RegExr is very much beta software (did I mention it was developed in a day?), and currently has no error handling whatsoever, so it’ll probably have a few quirks of its own.

RegExr uses an extension of the TextHilighter class that comes with the Spelling Plus Library. We will be including the RegExpHighlighter class with a future release of SPL.

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As you’ve probably heard already, Adobe demoed a new product called Thermo at the MAX Chicago Sneak Peeks session. In brief, Adobe describes it as a “RIA Design Tool”, which makes it easier to build fully functional Flex applications from design concepts. If you haven’t already, you should check out part 1, part 2, and part 3 of Aral Balkan’s video of Mark Ander’s demo of Thermo.

After watching the demo, and having a brief chat with Mark, one of the foremost questions I had was “Who will really use this tool?” Adobe is currently touting it as a designer tool, but I have enough experience in RIA development to know that I don’t want designers actually building applications.

As a way of answering this question for myself, and hopefully providing some useful feedback to Adobe, I decided to create user personas for the three types of people I see using Thermo. These are based purely on what I saw at the demo and a large dose of wild speculation. I’ve completely invented features (and in some case non-features) to highlight things I’d like to see, and challenges I think Thermo will face.

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Normally Flex will strip all ActionScript from an embedded Flash symbol. We’ve developed a technique called Shake’n’Bake SWFs (yes, I did watch Talladega Nights before coming up with the name), which allows you to utilize Flash symbols in Flex projects with all AS intact. I mentioned this technique at 360Flex, but didn’t go into much detail because there are better options available when using Flash CS3. A couple of people mentioned that they would like to learn about the technique, so I thought I’d blog about it.
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I’m not a big fan of working with fonts in Flex overall. Truetype font file embedding is hit or miss, and even embedding system fonts seems a little unreliable. Likewise, managing character sets (ie. the glyphs to embed) in Flex is quite rudimentary (unicode character codes? editing the global config XML? blech!). These features are manageable within Flex though, even if they are a little ugly.

One font related feature that’s completely missing from Flex though is support for creating bitmap fonts. This is a shame, because bitmap fonts are sharp and aliased, and look great at small sizes (ex. 9pt Arial is quite readable as a bitmap font).
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One of the challenges in using rich assets like images or Flash symbols in Flex is making them compatible with the Flex layout managers. There are a few ways to do this (some of which will be topics of future posts), but one of the easiest is to wrap the asset in a UIComponent instance that translates between the Flex layout API, and the basic Flash Player transformation API shared by all DisplayObjects.

I built a simple example of such a class, called DisplayObjectWrapper, which you can download and use or extend freely. It does a good job of translating Flex layout into resizes for it’s content, and vice versa. It’s super simple to use via mxml:
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I stumbled on this simple and interesting bug with the List component in Flex: Adding an item with a label of “toString” to a List component will break the List, and take down much of your application with it. Just add the following to a new or existing mxml app (tested in Flex 2.0.1):

<mx:List dataProvider=”[‘toString’]”/>

I find this bug interesting because despite thinking it over last night (when I should have been sleeping), I still can’t think of a good reason for why it occurs. The obvious culprit is the correlation between the string value, and List calling toString to get the label, and this somehow causes a conflict. I can’t think of a scenario where this would cause an issue though – calling toString on a string will merely return the string value, regardless of what that value is. I even tested (amongst other things) calling toString on a “toString” String (wow, convoluted) to ensure this wasn’t a deeper player level bug.

I haven’t had time to track down the cause in the framework yet, but I plan to soon. It’s bugging me, because I can’t see why there would be any correlation between this specific value of the label, and the rendering of the list item. I also have a programmer’s natural aversion to edge cases (what if my user adds an item named “toString”, and my whole app blows up?).

Hopefully there will be more, in-depth blog entries to come in the not too distant future. There’s been a lot of interesting stuff going on here at gskinner.com, including our work developing the v3 components set, continued work on our computer vision software, and our expansion into doing Flex work, which I’d love to blog about. Alas, my time is very short at the moment, between work, conferences, traveling, and building a new house (originally designed in Flash, though that’s a story for another entry).