[Fling] Some questions

[Chris Allen]

On 6/7/06, Scott Hyndman <scott at affsys.com> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
Hey, I am going to address both of the last emails in this thread here.

> So what exactly this project is going to offer the average Flash
> developer?
Well, already we have the AssetLoader API which was something that
wasn't addressed by any other existing solution out there. In addition
we will be providing an inversion of control container, implementing
the AOP features of Spring. I was talking with Sam the other day about
possibly implementing our own MVC pattern based on the Spring MVC too.
However, we aren't decided on this yet, as there already exists ARP
and other solutions for this.

> What about Spring makes it appropriate for a Flash client?

I think that being able to configure your application via IoC in an
XML file provides tremendous flexibility to any language. So, why
should ActionScript be any different? In addition, adding aspects
(proxied methods) to your code without having to alter core classes is
also quite powerful and certainly applicable to any language.
Providing clean and simple ways of configuring other libraries like
ARP, Cairngorm, portions of AS2Lib and others that we find
appropriate. Or, another good example of something to implement might
be providing simple configuration of the remoting library of
ActionStep.

> What advangates does this offer over ARP? What disadvangates?
>
Well speaking of ARP, like I said above, I think that Fling will
provide easier ways to configure something like ARP, much in the way
that Java Spring makes it simpler to use a library like Hibernate or
Struts. There should be IoC factories and other tools for easily
setting up an ARP project. Grant Davies will of course be a great help
with this part of the project as he uses ARP extensively.

> I just think these are important questions to ask before starting on something.
>
I can't agree more. ;-) Please ask more.

> Oh, and as far as internalization goes I think that it would be
> interesting to includes this. I have yet to see a good Flash app
> localization system in place except for the ones I've rolled myself.
> ;)
>
Sure, sounds good to me. We should certainly try to accomplish general
solutions that don't yet exists without going to overboard.

> Scott
>

erixtekila wrote:
> I'd also really interested in approaching the Aspect side of the
> programmation.
> Eventhough Simon tried to document it, I can't get the big picture.

Yeah, AOP can be really tough to understand. Basically think of it
like this. You don't have to implement really general things or
cross-cutting concerns in your business logic. You can instead setup
the configuration of Spring to proxy any methods to another one of
your choice. A simple example of this would be that you want to trace
out every time you make a remoting call to the server. You could in
this case proxy every method, let's say before it happens, to a custom
trace() method somewhere in your application. When you want to disable
this, it doesn't require recompilation and even better, your other
classes that handle the remoting calls don't have to be aware that a
trace of this info is going on. Later on you could decide to persists
this data in a database, so instead of proxying to a trace() method,
you can switch it to something that makes its own remoting call to the
server for saving this data.

Does that help at all? Others please help explain AOP if you have any
other insight.

> We hear tha Spring solves the heavy part of Java frameworks, Entreprise
> Beans in particular.

Well it does. And it's much easier to use than EJBs and the like. But,
the cool thing with Spring is that it can really be used to solve any
programming task. At my last job I wrote a proxy socket server for
Java that didn't utilize anything that a typical enterprise
application would do (no database connectivity, no data persistence or
transactions, no MVC). I simply used MINA, Apache commons HTTP client
and Jetty. Since I used Spring it made it so easy to configure and
organize the project. And AOP allowed me to handle the logging
efficiently (the last I left it, it was just writing to a file, but
this can easily be changed to persist to a database) Also, Red5 is
another example of a non-typical Java application that uses Spring.

> What for the Actionscript part do Fling solves/add ?

See above responses to Scott.

> Spring is dedicated to entreprise level.
> More and more frameworks comes out with those structure in mind, mostly
> mvc and advanced decoupled mvc tiers.
> If one could sum up the hottest features of Fling…

Well to me it would have to be the IoC container and that it can help
you build applications with the other tools mentioned above. The
AssetLoader and Manager are pretty sweet too though.

> BTW, as it is a new baby, just take your time to think iot before
> realize it :)

:-) I hope it's well thought out.

Please add your own thoughts.

-Chris