Spring ActionScript

Spring ActionScript is an offshoot of the Java-based Spring Framework written in ActionScript 3. It is targeted for the Flash, Flex and AIR platforms. The framework contains an Inversion of Control Container, an MVCS framework, extensions for the Cairngorm and PureMVC frameworks and several other utilities.

Developing software applications is hard enough even with good tools and technologies. Implementing applications using platforms which promise everything but turn out to be heavy-weight, hard to control and not very efficient during the development cycle makes it even harder. Spring Actionscript provides a full-featured IoC container and several low-level extensions to existing frameworks which can make daily life for a developer a little easier.

Spring Actionscript is modular, allowing you to use just those parts of it that you need, without having to bring in the rest. You can use the IoC container, but leave the Cairngorm extensions alone and use your own solutions instead.

Spring Actionscript aims to be non-obtrusive and not to impose any kind of unnecessary structure to your application while still promoting best practices in software development.

This document provides a reference guide to Spring Actionscript’s features. Since this document is still to be considered very much work-in-progress, if you have any requests or comments, please post them on the user mailing list or on the support forums at http://forum.springframework.org/forumdisplay.php?f=60.

 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