Over the last few weeks we have been rebuilding DevelopmentArc.com using Drupal as our new platform.  Prior to the switch over, we having been running Wordpress and it has been pretty good for the last year or so.  Unfortunately, we had purchased a template system that worked well for the launch yet to make it work we had to heavily modify the template and the CSS.

When Wordpress updated to 2.9, this broke all of the tempting systems and the developers had to roll out a new version.  This new roll out drastically changed a lot of the files that we had modified, and this caused us a lot of heartache trying to re-build our modifications in the new template framework.  We are currently planning a Drupal site for a client and we felt that rebuilding our site in Drupal was the perfect exercise.  Small enough to do it between other work and would also free us up from the previous template fiasco since we would be building it from the ground up.

Now that we have ported over to Drupal, our goal is to keep the site in parity to the first one.  Hopefully, you won't even tell a difference.  But now that we control the entire stack, we hope to roll out new content and updates on a much shorter timeline.  That, and we are finally wrapping up our book which has been our main focus for all our work and personal free time.  So, enjoy the "new" site and let us know what issues you all have!

I found an interesting trick with embedding fonts today while working with the Text Flow engine in Flex 4.  What I found out is that you can embed multiple fonts under the same font family name, but set the properties such as font weight or font style to different settings based on the font source you are using.  This may be an obvious thing to a lot of people, and the property name 'font-family' makes a lot more sense now, but for me it was a real 'ah-ha' moment.  By the way, this isn't just a Flex 4 thing, you can do this with Flex 3 and probably AS3 only projects (haven't tried that yet) but the issue became more apparent in Flex 4's new TLF enabled components.

The problem came about because we have a set of fonts that provide each style type in a unique OTF file, i.e. Font-Regular.otf, Font-Bold.otf, Font-Italic.otf, and Font-BoldItalic.otf.  In the past, we just embedded this with unique font-family ids (font-family: "Font-Regular") and then just bound them via CSS.  This approach becomes a significant problem when starting to work with TLF's selection management and Text Format.  We are building a simple Rich Text Editor in Flex 4 (since its not available yet in Beta 2) to allow a user to set their text to bold, italic or underline.  Simple enough, right?

In part one of the Flash Player Internals recap we covered how the player is built, for part two we talked about how the player infrastructure works.  In part three, we will examine how ActionScript and the Virtual Machine (VM) are improving in Flash Player 10.1.

What's New, Player-cat?

First off, Lee announced that the ActionScript VM has been updated to use the newest version of nanojit, which is the same VM backend that is used by Firefox 3.5.  This is an important update not only for performance, but because it supports many different processors.  Processor support is critical when you are looking to run the VM on as many devices and platforms as possible and nanojit helps the Player team do this.

The Player now has a much improved internal String class.  Strings have always been a bit of a bottle neck in Flash and the player team has updated the new class to allow better caching, faster string comparison, and most importantly lower memory usage.  This kind of low level update is great because it improves how our applications run without having to change a line of code.  Of course, you need to republish existing applications for 10.1 when it comes out (recall how the player versions SWFs), but the gains should be worth it.

On the memory front, the Player team has spent a lot of time focusing on how to use less of it more efficiently.  The first step they took is to have the VM take up less of a memory footprint.  Lee didn't get into any details but I would assume nanojit helped with this.  The other area they looked at was Garbage Collection (GC) and how it could be tuned for mobile devices.  What they have found is that memory usage has dropped anywhere from 10-50% for existing applications.  The GC tuning wasn't the sole update for this huge improvement, we will look at some other updates in part four, but this was a big one.

For the last three years I have attended the Adobe MAX session put on by Lee Thomason and Jim Corbett called "Flash Player Internals".  This is by far my favorite MAX session, because its extremely advanced, fast paced and they cover as much of the player's architecture as possible.  This year at the Adobe MAX 2009 conference, Jim was not able to join Lee for the session.  Its unfortunate because Jim and Lee's interplay is half the fun, but Lee is a great speaker and he handled covering the entire session like pro.

For the 2007 session, I wrote a huge recap article because they covered the first version of the player to support ActionScript 3.  This player changed how the virtual machine (VM) worked and they showed all kinds of tips and tricks based on the VM's architecture. You can read my previous posts over at my personal blog, VivisectingMedia. The write-up is a multi-part series that starts off covering the player teams motto about not breaking the web.  I skipped writing about 2008, mainly because we where just too busy starting DevelopmentArc, prepping for MAX Europe and the impeding holidays.

Now that MAX 2009 is all wrapped up its time to write up a multi-part series that recaps all the new topics that Lee delved into.  This round, Lee looked at all the upcoming changes in Flash Player 10.1 and I feel taking the time to research and write the posts are worth the effort.  You can watch Lee's session over at the MAX video site and if you have any questions or comments please send them our way.