One of the first things I had to learn when starting developing JavaScript applications was how to overcome lack of dependency management and concept of modules and namespaces. Unfortunately there are few JS books touching on these topics. When building large scale application, implementing hundreds of <script> tags becomes really hard to manage, especially when we need to keep them in specific order. Also the more script tags are included in the html files, the more requests a browser needs to do - this may cause a significant impact to the overall user experience - loading times, UI freezes... As JS lately became a language of choice for developing web applications targeting not only desktops but also mobile devices, developers needed to find a solution for that. Instead of waiting for changes to the JS specification (http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:modules) and for implementing that consequently to the popular browsers, they agreed for a standard that would be used both on server and client side and they named it CommonJS (http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/CommonJS). The solution works great with JS on the server side but due to the fact that files are loaded synchronously, it doesn't work well with browsers as this would block user interface during script load process. So the client side solution was modified for asynchronous loading by wrapping modules in files into callback functions. This is known as AMD - Asynchronous Module Definition
(https://github.com/amdjs/amdjs-api/wiki/AMD, http://requirejs.org/docs/whyamd.html). One of the most popular AMD loader solutions is the require.js and in this article we will look how to use it.

Inspired by the great blog post from Devon_O on conversion of GLSL (OpenGL) shaders to AGAL shaders, I decided to pick one of the examples available on Shader Toy website and to my suprise it wasn't that hard to get it working. I wanted to put the example with code on the Wonderfl but I can't get it running over there so I decided to put it here. And while I put it here, why not add just few additional words about shaders in AGAL...

I was asked to quickly build an algorithm to find the shortest path for a labirinth game. First thing I did was check for some quick ideas on Wikipedia and found this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinding. As there was only a text description I quickly wrote a simple ActionScript 3 class returning coordinates that create the shortest path.

Nearly half year after I published a quick tutorial on how to set everything up to build AIR apps for Android, I find it pretty much outdated... At that time Flash developers could export their projects for Android using AIR 2.5 and for iOS using PFI (Packager for iPhone) which had functionalities matching AIR 2.0. On March 2011 Adobe have released AIR 2.6, which brings plenty of new features to Android but more importantly it brings them to iOS as well. In this article I will go through steps to create and publish your first simple app for both devices - Android and iPhone using Flash Professional CS5 and AIR 2.6.