Today in the World of Adobe Flex
The promise from me to me is to set up a quick-and-dirty test harness in Flex for ActionScript. With this in place, the code presented in an article like “AS3: Singletons” can be easily consumed.
Another Flex-related article, “rawChildren.addChild() and it’s sneakyness,” underscores why every new Flex developer should know the importance of the UIComponent class. According to the official Adobe documentation:
The UIComponent class is the base class for all visual components, both interactive and noninteractive.
This means run away from anyone—including Adobe employees—when they try to teach you Flex and not spend at least three minutes beating you over the head with the UIComponent class. Every Flex or ActionScript3 developer is on thin ice when they go all wild cowboy and just use rawChildren.addChild() because “it just works.” Even the restless mind of a dreamer says, “Obviously this probably isn’t a “best practice” but I think this is really good to know and might come in handy if it’s your last resort.”