Actionscript 3 just keeps getting a little more Java
I don’t know exactly why I associate Inversion of Control (IoC) and Dependency Injection (DI) with Java… Well of course its because of Spring. But anyway, as Flex and AS continue to mature and the developer ecosystem grows we continue to see trends in the type of development being done. And as my title suggests many developers are following the techniques of Java. This post is not to debate the good and bad of that ( i love dynamic languages) but rather to highlight several projects that have had updates or releases lately.
The first of those is Swiz. Swiz is an IoC framework originally developed by Chris Scott. Chris is also responsible for (along with Dave Ross) ColdSpring a ColdFusion framework to implement IoC AOP and DI. Swiz is very lightweight and has some neat features like magic event handling and dynamic commands and mediators. Swiz uses metadata in your classes to wire up your application and also contains a central dispatching system.
Another project that just crossed my desk a couple days ago is Spring Actionscript. I saw this via Rob Gonda’s blog and am excited to see if it will gain traction based on it being a formal extension that is publicized on the Spring site. Spring Actionscript found its beginnings as the Prana framework which I only found out about recently while reviewing Flex on Rails which has several recipies using Prana.
And last but not least lets not forget Mate from ASFusion. This framework focuses on using MXML to setup all the mapping of events and architecture of your application. The framework also features Dependeny Injection which is why I feel comfortable adding it here. Mate seems to be a real up and comer in the Flex community with lots of people adding it to their competency list.
So keep up to date with the technologies available to you as a developer and check out these frameworks.
It’s always great to see more tools coming into the AS3/Flex space, but it is a little discouraging to know that I’m going to have to wait for a byte-weaving framework like CGLib because the language itself isn’t expressive enough to do what I want, at least when using types. That being said, I know there’s work being done in this space, , so I’m not gonna get too down about it. My hope is that AS3 will bring a new twist to the style of programming that we all learned in the Java world.
First example I saw that followed this pattern was ASWing (which started off in AS 2.0). Mad props to Iiley.
Don’t forget Loom… :)
- max