Emak Mafu Labs Blog

Recently here at emak mafu we’ve been building an internal framework to help quickly get some of sites up and running, and have been taking our queues from the Flex framework, asWing and the CS3 components. The best part about this is you get to dive into many peoples code to see their best practices and how they approach the problem (and sometimes shamelessly imitate it). Sometimes you will see a little to-do here, or a quirky comment from a developer as they implement a little hack, but sometimes you begin to get a whiff of a coding smell. This is not to say these frameworks are far in advance of our own, but I’d like to share one whiff that is too pungent to ignore.
The culprit is one mx.controls.listClasses.ListBase, in particular the method collectionChangeHandler(). The first thing to mention is that this class is nearly 10,000 lines long, which is an issue in itself although with the asDoc comments it is easy to forgive this. The method collectionChangeHandler is a method which is 395 lines long, which anyone who has read Refactoring will tell you is suffering from a bad case of long method, which is recommends a method be no longer then 10 - 20 lines.
Now to totally geek out, I started to count the number of if, try.. catch, and for.. loops so I could make a better point of why the method needs refactoring, but after 36th if.. else, 3rd try.. catch and 5th for.. loop I gave up. It is impossible to decipher the functionality without chatting to the author, and in such an important base class as well, where any of this behavior may need to be overriden. Anybody else out there found any blunders?

They are so lame it’s unreal. If I wasn’t on hold right now this rant would be 4 times as long but my 1 finger typing isn’t too hot. If any of your clients use them, move them now!!! ….. you are at queue position mehhh….

UPDATE: And 2 weeks later we are still trying to move away from Clara.net, to be expected really

So we got sent some t-shirts from Adobe last week, which was really exciting, apart from the fact that out of 15 there were 2 medium, 10 large, and 3 “goliath XXXXXL with extra cream please”. Me and Hugh are modeling the mens in the latter size…

The whole of Media Temple was down this morning, they had to take down their firewall for a few minutes so every service to every site was down. Anyone else noticing these outages?

1. It’s very uncool. Since when has a Microsoft product been exciting? And their touch technology doesn’t count, they nicked it off Jeff Han.
2. Something else to learn, please, I’ll have a brain overload if I try and take anything else on board.
3. It’s not open source. Flex is. End of story.
4. Flash diehards will never switch.
5. Java diehards definitely won’t switch.
6. I can’t install it.
7. Adobe have all the best people in the industry working for them.
8. It’s not pre-installed on any OS.
9. It has no distribution channel/penetration.
10. You can’t develop on a mac, you have to develop on .net which costs $$$$ (surprise surprise)!

And one reason why it might not fail over time: cash… Microsoft will pump billions into this until it works and they don’t care if they loose money on it for 10 years, just like they are doing with the XBox.

So I tried to install Silverlight today, just out of curiosity, just to see how rubbish it was and what a pain it would be to install. And surprise surprise:

I’d give up now if I were you….

So we have been using Media Temple for a while now, and I have noticed the service get worse and worse. We have had a kernel panic and a DOS attack in the space on 4 months, which is not good news. We are ready to jump ship soon, hopefully to Rackspace. We have been dealing with them for one client, and they seem to be rock solid, and based in the UK. Has anyone else go Media Temple woes? Please let us know…