Reflex: Rethinking Component Design

So is the title of the upcoming 360|Flex presentation on Reflex, a toolkit for Flash developers that has been in the works. The conference in March will finally mark its début:

With the emergence of so many new technologies it is an exciting time to be a developer. Embracing the spirit of advancement, Reflex was created to extend the Flash Platform with a component toolset worthy of its industry. Reinventing the features of Flex for the creative workflow, Reflex enhances the Flash Player (rather than abstracting it) to meet the demands of next generation applications and devices. Come be among the first to see what Reflex can do and learn about its unique architecture, the details of the project, its goals and its future. (session description)

The presentation will begin at 1:00pm on Tuesday, the 9th of March. Right after lunch. Be sure to come early for a good seat.

Custom Binding Released!

Delivered as promised. It has a smaller memory footprint, a faster clock-speed and, best of all, it’s 100% weak-referenced. Data binding is supposed to be light and unobtrusive. Now you can have the smallest ActionScript 3 binding available, released as a component of the open source Flight Framework.

Flight’s data binding is powerful and simple, consisting of two classes. A Binding object represents a single data source: a source object and a source-path, such as model and "user.userName". Any number of event listeners and object/property pairs can be registered with this single Binding instance, allowing each to update when the data source changes. This class may be useful for special needs, but you usually don’t deal with Binding directly.

The Bind class is the primary interface to Flight binding and is used much like you would use Flex BindingUtils. This class exposes a static API for adding and removing bindings and listeners. It can also be instantiated via MXML for special cases where you need weak-reference binding that curly-brace bindings just don’t support. Here’s an example of usage:

Binding via Static ActionScript API:

// Bind.addBinding(target:Object, targetPath:String, source:Object, sourcePath:String, twoWay:Boolean = false):Boolean
 
Bind.addBinding(this, "userTxt.text", this, "model.user.userName");

Instance binds via MXML:

<!-- constructor: Bind(target:Object = null, targetPath:String = null, source:Object = null, sourcePath:String = null, twoWay:Boolean = false):void -->
 
<flight :Bind targetPath="userTxt.text" sourcePath="model.user.userName"/>

Visit the Google Project to download release 0.8.1 or higher.

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