Christophe Herreman

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

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Cheers!

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!

Dear Community,

I'm pleased to announce that the Spring ActionScript 0.7 release is now available.

Download | API Documentation | Changelog

This is the first official release after switching from the Prana Framework to Spring ActionScript. Note that this release does not contain the Cairngorm and PureMVC extensions since these will later be released as separate extension libraries to the framework.

Some of the major changes and enhancements include:

Reflection API is now AS3Reflect

The reflection API is now provided as a separate project named AS3Reflect. This was a demand from several developers that wanted to use the reflection classes without having to use the whole Spring ActionScript codebase. For more info, please see http://code.google.com/p/as3reflect/

MVCS Support

Inspired by the MVCS principles that Joe Berkovitz describes, we created some experimental classes to support the MVCS workflow. Combining these principles with the IoC container of Spring ActionScript is actually very powerfull. Especially if you incorporate a presentation pattern like Presentation Model, you get maximum flexibility and simplicity by autowiring presentation models from the application context into the view layer of your application. I really recommend reading the MVCS and Presentation Model/Autowiring parts of a previous blog post I wrote about this.

IoC Container

We have improved many things in the IoC container and added support for new things like parent and dependant objects. We will continue to improve the core container as we work towards a 1.0 release and will add support for new tags and attributes based on community feedback. So be sure to get in touch with and give us your feedback.

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 or leave something in the comments. All help is more than welcome.

Enjoy this release and have fun coding!

As3reflect is a Reflection API written in ActionScript 3.0 and can be used for Flash/Flex/AIR and ActionScript projects. It is an intuïtive API on top of describeType() to give you runtime information of classes and instances. It also allows you to dynamically instantiate objects and invoke methods on existing objects.

This project consists of the reflection classes already available in the Spring ActionScript framework which are now delivered as a separate swc library.

More information and a first release candidate for the 1.0 version can be found at http://code.google.com/p/as3reflect/

Have fun!