shaun smith

RobotLegs AS3 is a Dependency Injection Driven MVCS Framework for Flash and Flex inspired by PureMVC.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but only got the chance to sit down and give it a bash this morning. It was pretty rushed, so I’ll probably redo these when I get a chance.

NOTE: If you don’t know PureMVC you should watch these first: PureMVC.TV

Update: The vids were pretty crap, so I removed them. Besides, they’re a bit dated now anyway (the framework’s API has tightened up quite a bit since this post). Have a look:

http://wiki.github.com/robotlegs/robotlegs-framework

Want a framework like PureMVC but without Singletons, Service Locators, or casting? Perhaps one with Dependency Injection and Automatic Mediator Registration?

Well, you might enjoy RobotLegs AS3: yet another lightweight micro-architecture for Rich Internet Applications.

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Warning: This is long and probably VERY boring.. unless you are an AS3 junkie, and you’re interested in so called “lightweight micro-architectural frameworks” for Flash and Flex.

A couple of weeks ago I played around with Mate and Swiz. I already knew a little about Dependency Injection (in theory anyway), but playing with those two frameworks really drove the point home: applications are potentially MUCH easier to write, and much more flexible, when you take advantage of Dependency Injection. Read more…

For the most part, Pijin development has been going pretty well. Maciek came down from London in December and we managed to come up with solutions for most of the tough conceptual challenges that were worrying us. Read more…

I’ve been using PureMVC for my Flash/Flex applications for quite a while now, and have generally found it to work quite well. Besides the obviously annoying abundance of boiler-plate code, it does a decent job of separating concerns, and has helped me to build better applications.

Lately, however, I’ve been building an application for which PureMVC has turned out to be a pretty poor fit. The term that some people have used to describe this kind of application is “Document-Based”.

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Thought it was about time to post some updates.
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So, I have a fairly large-scale flash application that I want to build.

In fact, it’s the whole reason I’ve been learning all this web application development stuff. It’s the reason I stopped freelancing as BoyBlack over a year ago, and took on a fulltime job at Hello Computer – so that I could get paid to implement all the research I’ve been doing, in a realistic fashion, one manageable project at a time. It’s also the reason why I recently negotiated to reduce my working hours to two days a week – so that I can start building the next version of my application.

But now that I’m ready to sit down and build this thing I’m faced with a couple of tough decisions:

• IDE: FDT or Flex Builder?
• PHP Framework: CodeIgniter or Zend Framework?
• Remoting: AMFPHP or WebOrb? Or just go JSON

At least I’m settled on using PureMVC as my Flash Framework (whether I decide to use Flex or not is another matter entirely!), and jQuery as my JavaScript library. Read more…

I just finished going through this tutorial by Dave Keen – an Action Script developer from the UK. I think it makes for a great introduction to PureMVC.

PureMVC Tutorial – Flex, PureMVC, Jabber and XIFF 3: Introduction:

http://www.actionscriptdeveloper.co.uk/puremvc-tutorial-flex-puremvc-jabber-and-xiff-3-introduction/

Oh yeh! That’s what I’m talking about! Check it out:

http://puremvc.org/content/view/68/1/

http://trac.puremvc.org/PureMVC_Haxe

Another PureMVC based AS3 site up. Check out the deep-linking. I think I might have gone a step too far!

www.earthcote.co.za

UPDATE: SWFAddress and FireFox 3 on Mac OS X Bug – I’m aware of the nasty white-flash bug with the site, but don’t have access to the source at the moment to fix it.