Dependency Injection Frameworks

Posted in February 28th, 2010

by Ed in Actionscript, Flash, Flex, Pattern

Recently there have been trends with many latest AS3 frameworks, particularly MVC design patterns, built upon Dependency Injection concept.

From Wikipedia:
“Dependency injection (DI) in object-oriented computer programming is a technique for supplying an external dependency (i.e. a reference) to a software component – that is, indicating to a part of a program which other parts it can use. It is a specific form of inversion of control where the concern being inverted is the process of obtaining the needed dependency.”

Apart from nearly outdated Cairngorm and famous PureMVC, frameworks like Mate, Swiz, Parsley and Robotlegs are all using DI to manage dependency.

Some of those frameworks are using Flex meta-data tag injection which some people might argue it is not standard ways but it is a trend…, and I particularly like Robotlegs as it is lightweight framework/toolkit, only contains few classes.

I have been using manual constructor DI with my own MVC framework for some times and might move to meta-data tag injection too:)

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Milky Particle Engine beta 0.6.8

Posted in February 19th, 2010

by Ed in Actionscript, Flash

Milky particle engine started out as a simple toolkit consists of 3 classes: manager, particle and controls classes, which works well on small scale projects.

After looking through various particle system APIs including C++ version, I found that Flint by Richard Lord is the most flexible way among those as it has separated particle initiation and action controls. So to create a flexible engine, I have re-factored many times during last 3 months and here we have Milky particle engine beta 0.6.8. Currently it does not support 3d but maybe will do in the future.

I have tried to make the API as simple as possible and have borrowed some of my Domo tween engine codes too. Basically Milky is a manager class that is similar to Domo and I have also created several effect presets (only Smoke at moment) so here is a simple usage:

^?View Code ACTIONSCRIPT

1	Milky.addEffect(target_mc, new Smoke());

Continue reading this post…

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Bitmap Motion Trail

Posted in February 15th, 2010

by Ed in Actionscript, Flash

I’ve been asked how to create motion trail in Flash several times but didn’t have time to look into it until I started to build my own particle engine last year which is still in beta and refinement…