ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns

The Recursive Clone

In describing the Prototype design pattern, the Gang of Four indicate that in the collaborations, the client asks a prototype to clone itself. (Go clone yourself!) As innocuous as that sounds, it turns out to be more than a little work, and the pattern, as GoF indicates, is tricky and easy to get wrong. With ActionScript 3.0, my response is, “…you have no idea!”

In a couple of earlier articles relating to the Prototype design pattern in this blog (ActionScript 3.0 Clone and ActionScript 3.0 Recursive Excursion) we looked at some of the issues relating to key elements of the Prototype design pattern, and if you’re thinking of using the Prototype pattern, you might want to take a look at them and some of the comments that readers have made. I’d prefer not to re-hash them here so that we can focus on the design pattern and not its components or underlying processes that we’ve already discussed. So to get started, let’s take a look at the Prototype class diagram in Figure 1:

Figure 1: Prototype Design Pattern

Because the pattern includes a Client class, you can see right away where the client connects to the other participants in the pattern and something about the nature of the relationship. The key here is that the client holds an object reference to the Prototype class. So the client is going to have some kind of Prototype reference.

Read more…

Recursion is one of those things I’ve been thinking about lately because of the recursive classes in the Prototype pattern. However, recursion isn’t something that I think about much, but at the OOPSLA conference in Nashville that is just now wrapping up, it came up in as a favored method over loops. A professor from Cornell University was making a presentation at one of the sessions I attended, and he noted that they introduce students to recursion before introducing loops , getting enthusiastic approval from some in the audience. Because I’ve been beating my head against the Prototype pattern, this was more than a little interesting. What’s so special about recursions?

Another Loop?

In some respects, recursion is just another looping structure, but programmers tend to think about them differently, and I thought I’d see what I could find from some of the big brains at OOPSLA. I talked with Dr. Axel Schreiner about recursion and got all I could ever imagine anyone would want to about them. However, like many, he considered recursion to be a loop structure and didn’t seem to be particularly excited whether loops or recursive structures were employed. For Axel, recursion and looping were a matter of looking at repeated actions in different ways.

Defined, a recursion is a method (or function) that can call itself. That doesn’t sound like a loop, but it does have a repeating element in that a recursive function repeats a process by the simple fact of calling itself. The most common examples of recursion is a factorial, but Fibonacci sequences and Towers of Hanoi are other common examples used to illustrate recursion. Since Fibonacci sequences are one of those just plain cool math structures, I thought I’d start with a Fibonacci sequence.

A Fibonacci Example

A Fibonacci sequence is one where each number in a sequence is made up of the sum of the previous two in the sequence. The sequence begins with 0 and 1:

0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21

Rather than using a loop to generate the sequence, the recursive function in the following example takes a parameter (r) and returns the next value in the sequence after r. The following class calls the recursive function via a trace() statement. (I was using Flex, but Flash works fine for the same function.)

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29

/*Fibonacci  generated in a recursive function*/
package
{
	import flash.display.Sprite;
 
	public class FibRecursion extends Sprite
	{
		public function FibRecursion()
		{
			trace(fibo(8));
		}
 
		private function fibo(r:uint):uint
		{
			if(r==0)
			{
				return 0;
			}
			else if (r==1)
			{
				return 1;
			}
			else
			{
				return fibo(r-1) + fibo(r-2);
			}
		}
	}
}

The recursion occurs in the third return statement. That is, part of the fibo() function calls itself. As you will see, the output is,

21

The question is, what’s going on inside the cursive function?

Read more…

Another View of the MVC Design Patterns

A while back Brian Lesser, another O’Reilly author and top notch Flash Media Server developer, mentioned that he did not especially care for the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern. While he cited some references, I never paid much attention to it at the time, especially since Chandima kept writing these brilliant pieces on Pure MVC. Further, I had promised myself that I wouldn’t touch MVC until I had worked my way through all of the design patterns using ActionScript 3.0 and felt comfortable with Flex. So I really am no expert of MVC and have relied on Chandima for that particular compound design.

After weeks of pounding my head on the Prototype pattern, I was thinking of taking a break and sending a torpedo into the Singleton to let off some steam. However, before sticking my neck out (yet again) I thought I’d ask Brian why he didn’t particularly care for the MVC, resulting in a very thoughtful article. (See http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/10/mvc-as-anti-pattern.html) Brian asked for Chandima’s and my reaction. Not having spent that much time on the MVC, my reaction was based on the logic of the article which to me made perfect sense. However, this is a case of “What do I know?” The annual OOPSLA conference is coming up this next week and I will be bringing up Brian’s points to big brains that attend OOPSLA–and I hope some more Flex/ActionScript/Flash developers will be there this year! So maybe after next week I’ll have some comments from seriously bright programmers in addition to our seriously bright programmer, Chandima.

So take a look at http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/10/mvc-as-anti-pattern.html and we’d like to get any copies of your comments, thoughts, and wisdom that have you about Brian’s article to post here as well.