Christophe Herreman

Dear Community,

I’m pleased to announce that the Spring ActionScript 0.8.1 release is now available.

Download | API Documentation | HTML Docs | PDF Docs | Changelog

This release includes the Spring ActionScript framework, the Cairngorm extensions and the PureMVC extensions and is mainly a bugfix release based on user feedback, for which we are very grateful.

Besides a series of bugfixes, we have also refactored the stage wiring system a bit so it now enables you to extend it with custom functionality. Two proof-of-concept implementations were added, namely the LocalizationStageProcessor and the SimpleSecurityStageProcessor.

LocalizationStageProcessor

This first processor enables you to assign resource values to components that are added to the stage, thus removing the need to add binding code for components at design-time. The values are assigned on a simple ‘configuration-by-name’ basis: a resource string in the form ‘myButton_label=Click me’ will assign the value ‘Click me’ to the label property of a stage component with the id ‘myButton’.

There’s a small sample app as well showcasing the localization processor.

SimpleSecurityStageProcessor

The second processor is slightly more elaborate and offers runtime security/authorization functionality.

There’s also a small sample application for this processor.

Basically what this processor does is create an ISecurityManager instance for a given component that is added to the stage. (Whether or not this creation will be considered is determined by the approval result of an IObjectSelector). This ISecurityManager holds a list of role and right names that are applicable for the specified stage component and is able to block access to the component after evaluation of these security rules.

The way to block access is determined by the AccessStrategy enum, that is part of the SimpleStageSecurityManager implementation of the ISecurityManager. It can set the enabled property to false, or visible to false, etc. The implementation of these security interfaces is SIMPLE, hence the names. For now, we didn’t want to include a very elaborate implementation since security can vary very widely from application to application. These interfaces are really meant as a ‘roll-your-own’ package, Spring ActionScript just offers the infrastructure in this case.

Last Words

Although this is a minor release, we would recommend all users to upgrade.

Further, we are always looking for user feedback and input. Be it bug reports, patches, new ideas, etc, all help is welcome. If you think you can contribute to the project in whatever way, don’t hesitate to leave something in the comments or mail me at christophe [DOT] herreman [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

Dear Community,

I’m pleased to announce that the Spring ActionScript 0.8 release is now available.

Download | API Documentation | HTML Docs | PDF Docs | Changelog

This release includes the Spring ActionScript framework, the Cairngorm extensions and the PureMVC extensions.

All libraries are available for download at the following Maven repository: http://projects.yoolab.org/maven/content/repositories/

From now on, we will regularly publish new snapshots of the libraries there.

Direct links to the libraries:
- Spring ActionScript 0.8
- Spring ActionScript Cairngorm 0.8
- Spring ActionScript PureMVC 0.8

Dependencies:
- AS3Commons Lang
- AS3Commons Logging
- AS3Commons Reflect

Note: AS3Commons Lang is a snapshot of 1.0. We will work with a release for the following releases of Spring ActionScript

Besides a series of bugfixes, optimizations and improvements, some of the major changes and enhancements include:

Autowiring support

Using autowiring allows you to inject objects managed by the container into view components and other objects. To autowire a property, annotate it with the [Autowired] metadata tag. The support we build in is pretty enhanced and allows you to customize the autowire behavior in many different ways. Within the Autowired metadata tag you can specify the object name and you can also configure the container to filter autowire candidates using your own filter specifications. Please see the documentation on autowiring for more info.

Custom Namespaces

The XML configuration now supports namespaces and allows you to create custom namespaces yourself. A few namespaces have been added to simplify the configuration of common objects for RMI and Messaging. More info on available namespaces and schemas and creating custom ones can be found in the documentation. The XSD schemas are available http://www.springactionscript.org/schema/

MXML Configuration

We now also support configuration through MXML. The markup is very similar to the regular XML config, but with some slight differences. Please see the documentation on MXML Configuration

AS3Commons

As a side project, we have started the AS3Commons project that offers reusable ActionScript 3.0 libraries. Most of the libraries currently available in AS3Commons are build using code from the Spring ActionScript framework. This means that a lot of code has been removed from Spring ActionScript and is now available for use in projects not using Spring ActionScript. Please note that you might have to update quite some import statements to refer to AS3Commons instead of Spring ActionScript. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause, but this is only a one-time process.

We hope you find the AS3Commons libraries useful. All libraries (releases and snapshots) can also be found at the Maven repository.

Documentation

The documentation has been tremendously improved in this version. Next to the API documentation, we now provide a reference guide in HTML and PDF format. General info can be found at the project website: www.springactionscript.org

Last Words

If you feel like helping us out, we could certainly use your help. This project is entirely created on a volunteer basis and in our spare (and limited) free time so needless to say that the more people, the faster we can deliver new releases and guarantee the quality of the framework. So if you think you have someting to offer, be it as a developer, tester, documentation writer, sample creator, … please contact me (christophe [DOT] herreman [AT] gmail [DOT] com) or leave something in the comments. All help is more than welcome.

Enjoy this release and have fun coding!

Some quick news about the status of the project.

The Spring ActionScript project has a new home at http://www.springactionscript.org!

We have been updating the documentation extensively and although this is still a work in progress, this should be a valuable resource to get started with the framework. Please see the “Documentation” section for more info and available doc formats.

There are also some neat new features like advanced autowiring and support for custom XML namespaces (available in SVN) that will be distributed with the new 0.8 release, expected to be released by the end of this week.

As usual, we appreciate any feedback. Join our Google developers group or the forum.

Have fun coding!

While working on the Spring ActionScript framework, we wrote a lot of code that could perfectly be used outside of the framework. That's why we decided to start the AS3Commons project, based on idea of the Apache Commons project, and provide a set of core libraries useful to every ActionScript 3.0 developer.

This announcement is also the immediate release of 2 of the libraries included:

• AS3Commons-Reflect: a reflection library
• AS3Commons-Logging: an abstraction layer over logging frameworks

Note: we realize there is another as3commons library out there. However this library is no longer being maintained and developed as confirmed by the author. We apologize in advance for the confusion this might cause. We are currently looking into the code and will try to include/replace the functionality in the new project.

AS3Commons-Reflect

This is a reflection library, or a clear API written around describeType(). It allows you to get runtime information about classes and objects running in your application, like the properties and methods available in a class, the metadata associated with a certain property, ... and it also allows you to dynamically instantiate objects and invoke their methods.

We had previously moved this from the Spring ActionScript sources to the AS3Reflect project. However, since we had plans of extracting other part of the framework as well, we decided to bundle everything under the AS3Commons project. The AS3Reflect library is hence no longer available and we advice all users to update to the new release.

For more info, please see http://www.as3commons.org/as3-commons-reflect

AS3Commons-Logging

This is a logging abstraction layer over existing logging frameworks. It is a lightweight library that offers a logger interface and a set of adapters and decorators for existing logging frameworks, like the logging API in the Flex framework.

It is perfectly fit for library and framework developers that want to enable logging information in their distributed libraries without tying their code to a specific logging framework. Logging happens via the logger interfaces provided by AS3Commons-Logging and users are then able to configure the logger with the implementation they prefer.

Here's a small example:

We will update the project with new adapters for existing logging frameworks. Let us know if you have any framework that you would like to see supported.

For more info, please see: http://www.as3commons.org/as3-commons-logging

Get Involved

We welcome participation from all that are interested, at all skill levels. Coding, documentation and testing are all critical parts of the software development process. If you are interested in participating in any of these aspects, please join us! You can leave a comment or mail me at christophe.herreman [at] gmail [dot] com.

www.as3commons.org

Dear Community,

I'm pleased to announce that the Spring ActionScript 0.7.1 release is now available.

Download | API Documentation | Changelog

This is a minor release that fixes 2 blocking issues:
- import nodes were not parsed correctly, which resulted in the imported nodes not being created.
- circular reference error when 2 objects have bidirectional references.

We also added some extra classes to the domain package.

Enjoy!