Hi,

Thank you for your answer,

As a comment I have posted some updates to the fabricator gem post and would love to read your thoughts about the template app, view handling etc.

As a side note, I have added the startup manager utility to fabricator and are in the process of finishing the next "beta" version.

2. ReactTo do not seam to work when you have a non referred component which uses ReactTo...

I am not sure I am completely clear about this. I use reflection to get a list of reaction handlers. Perhaps cross module references are not working with this. Can you post some sample code?

We will try to make a clean code example and post here. Though I do not think it has anything with cross module to do.

3. onRegister never executes when using Reflexive mediators with mx states...

States should also work with Reflexive mediators. Can you post the mxml you used.

We investigated this further and found a bug report at your google project which really looks like our problem: http://code.google.com/p/fabrication/issues/detail?id=4 is this fixed or

Apart from that nothing much is on the horizon apart from bug fixes.

peace,
darshan

Sounds good that there will be bug fixes and that it is still used. I was also very confused about the lack of user support for a framework like Fabrication, but perhaps I appreciate it more because I had to manually write all the wire code in my previous Multicore project. 

Kind regards
Steffen

Hi Darshan

I have had the pleasure of introducing my fabricator gem to two teams at where I work and thus also introducing the Fabrication framework. The primary goal of this is to get feedback to be able to improve the fabricator gem but also improve team development speed.

It seems that we have run into some issues / bugs with the framework and hope that You can help:

1. Release 0.6 of fabrication do not include AirApplication, as workaround we got the source code from subversion and this helped us create an Fabrication AirApplication.

2. ReactTo do not seam to work when you have a non referred component which uses ReactTo. Example we have a module1 that requests an ui component from module2. Module1 has no explicit reference to the ui component from module2, it just add it using Addchild. When module1 requests the component from module2, module2 creates the component and it's mediator, and sends the component to module1. Only addEventListener seems to work in the component for this scenario, reactTo methods leads to Nullpointer exception.

3. onRegister never executes when using Reflexive mediators with mx states. We have downloaded your demo Using Reflexive mediators with Application states and extracted the states-code to a component referenced in the application mxml file. Thus we use <mx:states instead of <fab:states in the component but this results in broken functionality(states), since the code never calls the onRegister method on the mediator of the deferred sub-component. We use this code to register the mediator (new ConfirmMediator(resolve(testView)..confirm).

Last I would love to know what the intentions are with Fabrication. Is it going to be further improved/developed on or is left for others to pick up? The reason I ask is, that we would really like to use Fabrication in production.

Thanx in advance
Steffen

What finally worked for me,

:

gem update rails (to get the newer version of active support which was reported by cucumber)
gem install newgem
gem install cucumber
gem install fabricator

I think there are some dependencies issues with the gem install. But after that I got the pureapp command working fine. Looking forward to the items on your todo list. ;-)

Hi Darshan

Thank you for your reply. I am in the process of finishing the module component generator and hope to release it soon but are going on vacation to London this weekend and have to work on a project with a deadline  .

My primary concern right now is how to handle loading and presenting the newly generated modules and how to handle switching between them. So if you have any great example code or ideas on how you are doing this in your own projects I would really love to incorporate it in the gem.

My wish is that the gem generated application will include full functional production ready code, where all the user has to do is to fill in the domain specific code. I have talked with our CTO and we would like to include unittest, guitest (flexmonkey?) and coverage meetering for all the generated code. I would also like a branch of the gem that includes a functional backend either rails with the RestfulX framework or a fullblown j2ee stack with BlazeDS or GraniteDS for server push and amf. But of course all this will first be included when the core functionality is good enough.

Sorry about the gem problems!, I will look into how I can manage dependencies.
Normally I just run sudo gem update (to update all gems) when I have problems like this. But newgem and cucumber should of course be installed if they are needed. The gem is also based on the hoe gem so unless newgem handles this dependency This could also give problems.

Kind regards
Steffen

Hi Darshan et all

I have been working on and off on the fabrication generator last week and is now able to generate the first scaffold fabrication app with two modules. As mentioned most of the code is based on the simple routing demo. The generator creates two modules: an authentication module and a dashboard module both compiled as swfs and loaded when needed.

It is still in a rather early state but I thought it would be a good idea to release it now so that I can avoid moving in a wrong direction.

As a remark I have solved the problems with custom proxy, command, mediator, package etc that Jason suggested. But this feature will first be included in a future release.

The source is hosted at github -> http://github.com/sejensen/fabricator/tree/master
And the ruby gem is released at rubyforge -> http://rubyforge.org/projects/pure-fab-gen/
(It took some time to get the project approved, but by using rubyforge everyone can easily install the gem)

Usage instructions: (this is on mac with osx 10.5, assumes that ruby and rubygems are installed)
install gem: sudo gem install fabricator (currently version 0.0.5)
generate app: pureapp  AppName org.my.custom.package 'app title'
import project in flex builder as flex project: run AppNameShell.mxml

To create module codestructure
cd AppName
Run ruby script/generate pure_module ModuleName

example ruby script/generate pure_module Address -> results in AddressModule.mxml plus generated code for the new module. You have to overwrite the files when asked this is required to be able to genrate all the modules you want and still get all of them build etc.

Disclaimer for now the module is not included in the app, Since I am currently refactoring mediator and container code. but I thought being able to generate the skeleton and classes was a good start and the new module gets compiled as seperate swf.

That should be it! Hope to get some feedback, also on the currently generated code which is a little sparse. And if anyone have an idea of a more complex general app to generate that would be great?.

Enjoy 
/Steffen
P.S. I hope the name fabricator is okay?

Hey Steffen,

Thanks for trying Fabrication. The generator idea sounds really great. I have been meaning to do something like that but have been a little busy at work. I have used Rails a few times recently and it is always a lot of fun to work with.

I think the nicest thing to have would be Component generators. For instance most of my Proxies cast the data to the concrete data type for a little strong typing.
...

peace,
darshan

Hi Darshan

Thank you very much for your comments and ideas, I will look into how these can be implemented with rubigen. One obvious problem is that I would like to support custom packages for all application and component code, that means that I have to parse generated code to obtain the correct package etc for the new code or require it as a parameter which can be a bit cumbersome. Rubigen is based on ruby code, but due to Rails's convention over configuration they avoid this problem for their component generators. A controller goes into controller and model into model etc.

Would it be usefull if the component generators could generate a complete module with startupcommand, proxy, mediator etc with the correct namespace etc and perhaps optional parameters like datatype for the proxy. And the same idea for just a proxy or mediator generator?

Does this makes sense? The idea is that all the skeleton code gets generated, and perhaps som default usage code, which easily can be removed / modified?

Thank you in advance!
/Steffen

It would be great if you could alter what classes things extended from. In my Fab app I use a custom base Mediator, Command, Proxy and ApplicationFacade which extend from the Fabrication bases.

Hi Jason

Thank You for your comments. It is of course possible to be able to configure the extending classes. But could You provide an example where this would be a feature users would need in general, just a proxy or something.

The reason I ask is  that gems has the inconvenience as far as I know that it gets its arguments from command line. This will make it a bit complex if I would include all the mentioned arguments. Another soloution would be to add component generators for this, such as a "generate proxy name parant_class ...".

What do you think?

/Steffen

Hi everybody, especially Darshan.

I have been using puremvc for a while and got a little tired by the boilerplate startupcode needed for a new application. But still thinks that the whole idea ROCKS!!!! I know that copy paste helps a lot but found fabrication and saw that as the solution to my problems.

Still I would love to be able to only write the essential code of an app and at the company I work for, we could really benefit from a tool that could create app skeleton, moduleskeleton etc. etc.

Therefore I looked in to Dr. Nics Rubigen gem and has started on creating a gem that can do the above. I haven't really created an app based on fabrication yet, but wants the gem to create fabrication code. I have used the simple routing example as inspiration and for now it works quite okay. Have completed the first app skeleton with a single shell, mediator etc.

My question is whether someone has requests, ideas, template-code etc for such a gem?

I have convinced my management that it is okay for me to use workhours on this gem. So if anyone can help with ideas, code etc, that would be great and of course the gem will be publicly available if it results in anything useful.

Looking forward to hear from You.

Thank you in advance
Steffen Egelund Jensen