Comments on: ViewStack in Flash

By: Tim Scollick

Tim Scollick — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 20:16:17 +0000

Who knows? Maybe you did have the best answer. This is an article that shuns the extends keyword like the plague:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-2003/jw-0801-toolbox.html

Of course, it also assumes that you’re designing your solution from the group up (which isn’t the case for you).

By: JesterXL

JesterXL — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 19:55:15 +0000

…ok, just had a talk with my co-worker who is a pretty good developer. He explained my attitude is from someone who hasn’t done a lot of collaboration with other developers on projects. Another developer would have no idea that I had implemented those methods. I should instead inherit like you said.

Live and learn!

By: JesterXL

JesterXL — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 18:34:52 +0000

If you look at the View class compared to the Flex class, it is incomplete. As stated in my other article about View.

I think View needed a few other methods to make it a worthwhile class to inherit from.

It is dangerous, but I see the benefit from it, so do all of my classes, and we have QA setup in place (plus other developers to body check my work). The class is inheritanly not finished to my needs, and I don’t feel like changing the existing class with prototype because I actually have access to it, unlike MovieClip or Array.

Extending a class JUST to implement one method seems like a bad decision to me. Implementing a Decorator pattern via prototype doesn’t seem like a good decision either since everyone is inheriting form it, so why not just improve on the base class?

I hope that explains my decision.

By: Tim Scollick

Tim Scollick — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 16:03:38 +0000

Cool stuff, Jesse. But why do you edit the mx.core.View class? Editing MM’s base classes seems a little dangerous don’t you think? Why don’t you just extend mx.core.View with the new method?

By: JesterXL

JesterXL — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 15:56:14 +0000

Because you might have other objects created in your class (although you should let View handle this), you cannot depend on depth. Although I do like the Flex API better, the point here is depth, currently, is not always accurate of what is in your class AND in the future, this may change…