RE: [flexcoders] Re: decimal numbers in financial applications

[Jack W. Caldwell @ Zingit Technologies, Inc.]

Gordon:   I must be missing something here.  Are you saying that, for example, if I had a datagrid with 10 rows and one of the columns has 2 digit decimal numbers in it and I wanted to get the average of the ten numbers . . . . .   that we can NOT do that in AS?  That we have to send a server request and calculate it in the server and wait for it to come back . . . .   I have to be missing something . . . . I hope.   Thanks,   Jack From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gordon Smith Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2006 4:22 PM To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: RE: [flexcoders] Re: decimal numbers in financial applications Hi, Matt. We worked closely with many enterprise customers, including financial ones, during our development phase and beta period, and support for decimal arithmetic was not a priority for them. I've also read many thousands of FlexCoders and Beta list emails during the Flex 1, 1.5, and 2 cycles, and I recall only a handful raising this issue. Like you, I'm surprised by this. I don't know whether most Flex developers simply haven't needed decimal arithmetic for the applications they are developing, or whether they're working around the lack of it in _javascript_, ECMAScript, ActionScript, and Flex  by using some particular technique such as doing server-side computation, scaling to integers, or porting a library like you're considering. I believe the committee designing the next version of ECMAScript, which Adobe sits on, is considering adding a decimal type to the language. In the meantime, I think a community effort to port an open-source library would be great. Adobe would probably be happy to help make it available. However, given the relatively small percentage of our customers asking for this feature, it's unlikely that the Flex team will write or port such a library in the near future. - Gordon From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]ups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]ups.com] On Behalf Of busitech Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2006 11:24 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]ups.com Subject: [flexcoders] Re: decimal numbers in financial applications Gordon, Thank you very much for the reply. I'm very surprised that the decision was made at some point that support for fixed decimal numbers was not absolutely an essential and required part of the product and framework before release, when targeting the enterprise customer. We need an immediate solution beyond dumbing down the client side to only use strings. So much functionality would be given up in that scenario that I'd be ashamed and embarrased of our product in the end. I'm considering creating a port to Actionscript of "BigDecimal for _javascript_" which is an open source project. See http://freshmeat.net/projects/js_bigdecimal/ Custom serialization is outlined on pg 1098 of the Developer's Guide. I'm hoping I can extend BigDecimal and implement Externalizable, create a new similar object in Actionscript, and get them to serialize/deserialize correctly. Hopefully there's nothing in the Java adapter standing in the way of making this work... Any help or advice on this would be appreciated. The BigDecimal is mentioned on page 1091 of the Developer's Guide as being deserialized to both int/uint and number, with no further explanation. As I've pointed out, BigDecimal is completely incompatible with both of these AS types. Matt __._,_.___ -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com SPONSORED LINKS Software development tool Software development Software development services Home design software Software development company YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS  Visit your group "flexcoders" on the web.    To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. __,_._,___