Preface | xixWe are grateful to Professor John Gray, chair of the Multimedia Web Design and
Development program at the University of Hartford. His encouragement and sup-
port in all matters pertaining to Internet and Web development, research and learn-
ing provide us with a rich atmosphere and wonderful resources to keep on track with
the ever expanding universe of the technology we use.
Technical Reviewers
The technical reviewers had their job cut out for them. Some of the reviewers were
experts on design patterns with C# and Java backgrounds, but were unfamiliar with
ActionScript. Fortunately, ActionScript 3.0 is looking and acting like other OOP lan-
guages, and so they were able to give us a great deal of help. Chief among this group
was Adrienne Decker who is a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering at SUNY Buffalo. After sharing a session with Adrienne at the 2006
Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA)
Conference in Portland, Oregon, it became clear that Adrienne not only was wise in
the ways of design patterns, she was also very interested in how to best communi-
cate the inner workings of design patterns. She was an immense help. Two other aca-
demics recruited to this project were Dr. James Heilotis and Dr. Axel Schreiner, both
of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Department of Computer Science. Profes-
sor Schreiner had presented a design pattern named the Symmetric Proxy Pattern at
the 2006 OOPSLA conference. Based on a paper,A Pattern for Distributing Turn-
Based Games, by Heilotis and Schreiner, this new pattern seemed to be an excellent
tool for gaming over the Internet using Flash and Flash Media Server 2. We believed
that given the newness and creativity of the Symmetric Proxy Pattern, we would be
well-advised to ask them for a technical review of our implementation and explana-
tion of their pattern. They were very helpful in seeing to it that we were able to com-
municate their ideas, and we are most grateful to them both.
We were most fortunate to get the services of Todd Anderson. Todd is a bright light
in the ActionScript 3.0 and design pattern mix. He helped us immensely and we are
most grateful to Todd’s sharp eye and spot-on comments. Darren Richardson was
our technical reviewer from the outset. He also brought an international perspective
in case we got a bit too ethnocentric.
We also had the unique opportunity of working with The City’s Flash Coders New
York (FCNY) group led by Jean-Charles Carelli. With considerable talent to spare,
members of this group worked on (and over) our manuscript as technical reviewers.
Their comments were quite helpful, and reflected an excellent cross-section of savvy
ActionScript developers. Chief among those who aided in this process were Tyler Lar-
son, Jim Kremens, Dominic Tancredi, Shari Halter, James O’Reilly, Andrew Hunt,
Brian Weisenthal, Oscar Trelles, Seth Hillinger, Lisa Larson, and Edward Skrypa.