Swiz in plain AS3 projects

23.10.2009

After working with swiz for two projects I am allready at the point where I don't want to miss it again.
For a current customer though, my colleague and I needed to code a raw ActionScript project and guess what.. we where not at all amused not to have swiz on our sides ;-)
This is where I decided to take a look and see if I can get swiz to work on plain AS3 projects.

After some hours of work the result was there Surprisingly fast...

The Changes

here is what was modified:

• SwizConfig has an init function now, which needs the main Class of the application as an argument.
• The default injection event was changed back to addedToStage
• view-autowiring is done directly after a view was added to the stage (the original swiz waits for the creationComplete event for this to happen)
• The BeanLoader now has an abstract function 'initBeans' in which you can just put your beans into a dictionary.

As you can see, the modifications are less than minor. The only drawback is that I could not get rid of all mx.* dependencies (approximately 80kb increase in filesize) but I think most people could live with it.

Get It

To download our modified version of swiz just grab your favorite subversion client, and check it out from svn://negdis.com/swiz/Trunk/src

In This folder you will also find an example project showing how to get started.

How To Start in 5 easy steps

If you want to start your own pure ActionScript project with swiz, here is what you will have to do:

1. As with Flex, add swiz-specific metadata into your project properties

2. Further add the Flex dependencies..

you get them by adding the /framework/libs and the /frameworks/locale/en_US folders from the Flex sdk as an swc-folder.

3. Initializing Swiz

Before adding anything to the stage, you will have to initialize and start swiz with SwizConfig:

 
sConfig = new SwizConfig();
sConfig.beanLoaders = [Beans];
sConfig.eventPackages = "just.an.example.events";
sConfig.mediateBubbledEvents = true;
sConfig.viewPackages = "just.an.example.view";
sConfig.strict = true;
sConfig.init(this);
 

4. Register you beans

You get your beans to work by extending the BeanLoader, overriding the function initBeans and assigning them to the provided property 'beans':

 
package just.an.example.beans
{
	import just.an.example.controller.MyController;
	import just.an.example.model.MyModel;
	import org.swizframework.util.BeanLoader;
 
	public class Beans extends BeanLoader
	{
		override protected function initBeans():void
		{
			beans['myController'] = new MyController();
			beans['myModel'] = new MyModel();
		}
	}
}
 

5. Rock your project!

Everything else should work as expected. Mediation of events, autowiring of beans and views.. you won't even loose the rich extended binding features of swiz :-) 

Final Words

We know that the swiz guys are currently working on a pure AS version of their framework and we can't wait for it to be released. For those of you who can't wait too, this could be a good temporary solution ;-)