Comments on: Modular ActionScript Development

By: raul

raul — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 20:19:32 +0000

By: Derrick

Derrick — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 03:27:23 +0000

Great post. I agree that there is no easy way to develop and deploy a large Flash/Flex app without worrying about which classes are going to get clobbered. I don’t neccessarily agree that using RSL’s is a bad thing though. In Flex 2 building and deploying RSL’s is a piece of cake. If you use an RSL to deploy shared classes ie (a ModelLocator, Commands, utility classes) then it works great, all movies share the exact same classes, nice and easy to manage. The only big issue I have with RSL’s in Flex 2 is that anything you build that leverages the Flex framework means you pull the entire (almost 400K) framework into your RSL. So a simple class with a TextInput or Button and you take a big hit.

Once Adobe gives developers some better tools for controlling what goes into an RSL from the framework I think that path will provide most people with a really decent solution.

By: timbot

timbot — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 21:18:30 +0000

I can totally relate to what Jesse is saying here. In the wild west of online advertising, the one constant is change. The developer must remember that they are working for the designer, not the other way around. They want what they want regardless if it conforms to your framework or not. In this kind of business, one must sacrifice a certain amount of the benefits yielded by a framework by keeping that framework very open. Probably the most you can hope for is; code external, a loose interpretation of mvc, some managers, and a whole lotta jsfl.

By: JesterXL

JesterXL — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 19:11:26 +0000

Again, from a Flash Developer perspective, I agree. However, things like mtasc, ANT, and FDT do not work well when doing design based projects. If the designer cannot compile locally on his/her machine with the FLA, that’s a failure in the workflow.

My favorite workflow is when a desginer hands off a FLA, and I rebuild the FLA and integrate the assets into my codebase. At more creative shops and marketing agencies, that workflow doesn’t work. You’ll get drastic design changes down to the wire, and there is no way to shield your code base from such changes. The best bet is to keep the design in the FLA so your designers can tweak things if needed.

As such, the developer(s) need to be able to work in tandem, peacefully, with the designers. Setting them up with Eclipse, or getting an existing code-base to be mtasc compatible isn’t relistic in some of the short time frames introduced. Granted, I’ve heard of a positive workflow in another company where the designer utilizes Flex Builder 2 to mock up designs in MXML and the programmer takes over from there. That is ideal, but a lot of these places still use, and will continue to use, Flash. Eclipse is an alien thing to inject into the workflow, but maybe it could work.

If you look at this from a developer / designer workflow, you can see where the sacrifices are and why some things just don’t work in from that perspective.

By: S

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 18:32:57 +0000

Yes, but the intrinsic codebase can be generated automatically. Hamtasc supports this and so it could be used via Ant.
Another scenario where I used intrinsics. I had an AS2 classlib which was not compatible to MTASC. So I generated intrinsics with which I compiled my application using MTASC. Then the main movie loads a SWF which contains the comiled classlib and all is working …

Anyway you have to know what you are doing when using intrinsics and it’s perhaps not the best workflow but in some situations I think it’s a nice solution.