framework

Flex Frameworks

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript, flex , , , ,

Luke Bayes and Ali Mills of PatternPark made a presentation for the Silicon Valley Flex Users Group (SilvaFUG) of 9 different frameworks and toolkits for creating Flex applications: Cairngorm, PureMVC, ARP, MVCS, Flest, Model-Glue: Flex, ServerBox Foundry, Guasax, and Slide.

Watch the presentation: http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p12266504/
See the slides: http://www.asserttrue.com/files/ApplicationFrameworks/index.html

Their Conclusion?
“PureMVC by Cliff Hall beats out the alternatives“.

  • Composition over inheritence
  • Liberal use of Interfaces
  • Indirection is used but not overwhelming
  • Instance members hide singleton references from application code
  • MXML views can be extremely thin
  • Benefits of Cairngorm, with few of the disadvantages.

I must admit I never used PureMVC, the only framework I’m currently using is Cairngorm, even if I bookmarked the pureMVC page long time ago promising myself to watch it more in deep. Now it’s time to keep the promise.

ActionStep Alpha 1 Released!

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript , , , ,

ActionStep crew released the first alpha release of ActionStep component framework.
It’s been a while since I’m looking at this project and I must admit they’re doing a great and hard work.
What is ActionStep?
ActionStep is an Actionscript 2.0 implementation of a subset of the OpenStep Application Kit and aim to be a valid alternative to Flash V2 Components.
The alpha 1 release comes with an example (through buildExample.bat, which compile using MTASC). See the example here
Links
ActionStep on OSFlash: http://osflash.org/doku.php?id=actionstep
ActionStep components’ list: http://osflash.org/actionstep_components_list
Download
It can be downloaded from: actionstep_alpha_1.zip
http://actionstep.org/

Update on SEPY 2

Alessandro Crugnola SEPY , ,

As I announced some time ago the project for re-writing from scratch SEPY is already started..
actually the framework is quite complete and at the state of art it’s a full basic text editor. Today I met Gabriele, the same guy who helped me in the preliminary phases of sepy1, and we decided some of the new SEPY2 guidelines and how we want to proceed..
SE|PY 2 will be made using a similar, but more more simpler, process as the one used by Eclipse, that is plugin based.
This can help us, but also everyone who want to extend it in the future, with panels (which will be completely independent from the main application), and document classes.
As regarding panels we’re still thinking at the best solution for the workspace management.. maybe a solution similar to the one used by Macromedia software.
any preference here?

BTW, the very first thing in the TODO list it’s indeed the autocompletion system, which must be written as powerful as possible, thus mantaining good performances. This is the first and the core feature, without that the editor could not live…

Other important features will be the support for Flex and all XML in general, maybe using DTD for the autocompletion (for xml files)…

If it will be possible, we have thought also in extending scintilla functionallity in order to have a custom lexer for “.as” files, with extended folding and colouring features.
for example:
//#region
…
//#endregion
will create automatically folds region…

I hope that basing on the experienced I made with python in the last 2 years and thanks to all the feedback I received during this period to be able to create a better tool for developing flash..