Form and Function

I am not sure how many other flex developers have experienced this, but the latest rev's of the Flash player break some existing Flex generated content. I don't mean slightly annoying UI issues, the player downright stops the application from functioning.

The two issues I have found when running Flex content that has been generated by the latest version of Flex Builder 2 (2.0.1) inside a flash player version higher than 9.0.4xx (mostly the player targeted for AIR and Flex 3) are the following:

1. var myObj:SharedObject=new SharedObject();
2. myObject.function = function dummyFunc():void { //do something }

In the first case I suspect that statement was never valid in the first place, but we had code that was compiled in Flex 2 that had these statements and the compiler never complained. Now if we try to run these .swf's within the latest player the application stops working after burping an error telling us we can not instantiate a SharedObject (i believe it is a static class)

The second case is less obvious, but basically the new player will not allow anonymous NAMED functions. So the statement must read like the below.

myObject.function = function ():void { //do something }

I remember reading another blog post that pointed me to this.

Anyway, I am surprised Adobe is doing auto-updates with these types of changes and not making the developer community aware of the potential pitfalls.... The more Flex becomes prevalent on the web in public web sites the more things like this will become an issue.

- Tom