Introducing Spring ActionScript

[cherreman]

Dear community,

I'm pleased to introduce a new Spring extension called Spring ActionScript. This extension, formerly known as the Prana Framework, is aimed at bringing Inversion of Control to ActionScript along with several other interesting utilities.

The extension is written in ActionScript 3 and is targeted at Flex, AIR and Flash developers. The IoC container and its XML dialect is heavily influenced by that of Spring so it should be easy for developers familiar with Spring to get started with it.

Spring ActionScript contains the following features:
* Inversion of Control container - XML driven, based on Spring
* Reflection API - providing a decent API around describeType()
* Cairngorm extensions - configurable Service Locator, extended Front Controller with command factories, Command chaining, ...
* PureMVC extensions - bringing Dependency Injection to PureMVC
* several utilities, assertions, etc

We are also working on the following features, all of which are in an experimental phase:
* MVCS support - providing an architectural framework based on Model-View-Controller-Service
* Domain Driven Design utilities - base classes for entities, value objects, enums, repositories and services
* SqlLite database templates
* Aspect Oriented Programming

The project is currently incubated as we work towards a 1.0 release. The latest available (Prana) release is 0.6 and we plan to release a 0.6.1 version in the coming weeks that introduces the switch to Spring ActionScript.

For more info, please see the following links:

* SVN - http://src.springframework.org/svn/s...ctionscript-as
* FishEye - http://fisheye.springframework.org/b...ctionscript-as
* JIRA - http://jira.springframework.org/brow...ACTIONSCRIPTAS
* Prana Framework - http://www.pranaframework.org

Thanks to SpringSource and everyone involved in making this happen!

Hope you enjoy this extension!

- Christophe Herreman

[borfnorton]

This is awesome news, given that Spring is backing this framework, developers can rest confident that it will be the container of choice for AS3.

[leftieFriele]

The MVC support mentioned would that be a separate project?
One of the beauties of the Spring Framework for Java is that you can use it on almost any project and the MVC part is a separate project. Especially in ActionScript applications where you want the footprint of the application to be as small as possible it would make little sense to add everything into one massive framework.

[cherreman]

Hi leftieFriele,

once we release the MVC part, it will most likely be a separate swc (and hence a separate project based on Spring ActionScript core). Since this is now still experimental, we added it to the main code repository.

regards,
Christophe

[pHk]

Good stuff, will experiment and try to contribute some examples when I find the time to do so

[argon]

Great Job, hope the release will be soon!

[rfkrocktk]

Hey all, I kind of wrote a tutorial on using Spring Actionscript (Prana) in comparison to the other IOC libraries for AS3. I also posted a few simple projects to help you get started using Spring Actionscript. Hope this benefits the community!

http://blog.tkassembled.com/2009/01/...ionscript.html

[jasonchen_nj]

I am the longtime Spring Framework developers since Spring 1.x.

Now as my company following the trend to the RIA area, it's just nature for a Java developers go to the AC path.

I am glad that finally, there is an official "Spring Framework" project for AC from the Spring community.

Together with BlazeDS, Maven 2 and the Spring in AC will empower all the Java developers into the flash world.

[Ryan Gardner]

Any word on the MVCS framework you mentioned in this post?

I'm pretty fed up with the existing solutions and might be doing a major refactoring of an existing application and would be interested in a more intelligent MVCS setup on the flex side.

[666shooter]

Hey Ryan,

all the tools are available in the trunk to build your own MVCS implementation. We have more or less let go of the idea of providing a concrete framework but opted for a collection of classes and interfaces that enable to set up an MVCS/MVC structure that suits your specific application instead.

If you examine the org.springextensions.actionscript.core.* package in the SVN trunk you will find all the necessary classes and interfaces.

Also check the Organizer project in the spring-actionscript-samples/organizer folder for an example implementation that utililizes most of the bits and pieces.

And please let us know your thoughts of course


cheers,

Roland