Hi Mark,

The common.swc is a merged swc of all dependencies of the application. The swc file format is just a zip file with a manifest of its contents. Fabrication based applications have 2 dependencies, PureMVC multicore and PureMVC pipes. I have merged these together into one swc for easier development. If you are interested in how to do this, check out the fabrication build system. To do a merge of multiple swcs into one use,

:

<merge-swcs output="output.swc">
   <fileset dir="swcs.dir">
      <include name="name.of.swc" />
   </fileset>
</merge-swcs>

The implementation only works with simple swcs. Swcs that have additional assets and graphics don't work well with this macro. Also the merge is not at the swf level. The merged swcs contains multiple swfs, so its not ideal if you use runtime shared libraries and need a common swf.

peace,
darshan

Fabrication is a rapid application development extension for PureMVC. It is built on top of PureMVC multicore. However you do not need to implement things specific to the multicore like multiton keys and such. Instead you extend classes like FlexApplication, FlashApplication etc. These provide the default implementations of all the multicore requirements.

From the pov of Fabrication the only conceptual difference between a standard and multicore PureMVC application is the use of onRegister in your mediators instead of putting the code in the constructor of the mediator. And since it is built on top of multicore, you would use classes from the multicore package.

You can find more details about the Features[1] and Documentation[2] in the links below.

peace,
darshan

[1] : http://code.google.com/p/fabrication/wiki/Features
[2] : http://code.google.com/p/fabrication/w/list

Hey calimero,

That error doesn't look quite right.You are probably be using an older version of the routing demo example code. You can get the example updated to 0.5.2 from the svn[1]. Hope that helps.

[1] : http://fabrication.googlecode.com/svn/examples/simple_routing/

peace,
darshan

Jason,

I have changed the order of disposal to view, controller, and model on svn. The executeCommand although public is called by the View, So I would like to track if a command unexpected disappeared from the map.

peace,
darshan

Looking at the FocusManager's constructor it seems to listen for Event.ADDED and Event.REMOVED. You could force it to trigger the internal removeHandler by sending a custom event with stage.dispatchEvent(new Event(Event.REMOVED). That might work but will probably have side effects to existing components. Forcibly linking the component in the parent swf is likely the best approach.

peace,
darshan

Me too on the _exclude.xml, very useful feature. Meanwhile, I have pushed a 0.5.1 update with the fix onto googlecode with newer swcs and zip.

peace,
darshan

I've linked to SWC's, but never tried compiling them into a Flash file. I didn't think it was possible. Reading that article it sounds overly complicated and something most aren't likely to go through just to use a swc.

Jason, what I gathered from the article was that the difficult part may be creating such a swc that works with Flash CS3. The process seemed complicated but with something like ant it's a one time thing to build. After that, the usage was 2 phased, load the library swf and use the classes with the swc on the classpath.

I agree that the swc approach isn't suitable when debugging. But the convenience of a swc surely is useful for general purpose flow. I also go the source route when I encounter something odd, but generally I won't recompile everything from scratch.

Btw, have you used CS4. Is there anything different with its swc implementation.

peace,
darshan

Hey Jason,

I have fixed this on svn. I will make a minor release later. Before that I want to get some ideas on how best to release Fabrication for flash. I have been doing some research on this and I came across this link,

http://labs.wichers.nu/2007/12/25/using-flex-compiled-code-within-flash/

This seems to indicate that it is possible to compile(not just link) with as3 based swcs with flash by just putting them on the classpath. Is this something you have worked out? Any ideas or suggestion would be great. Thanks.

peace,
darshan

Damn, the hello_flash example is the only one that I didn't recompile! I will move the initializeRouteMapper into the flex mediator.

peace,
darshan

Hey Jason,

I have fixed the garbage collection issues. You need to grab 0.5 sources to get the fixes. Regarding your example, I have emailed you a modified version of your file with the fixes. The file is too big to post here and my blog's upload limit is only 2mb...

peace,
darshan

Hi All,

I have released Fabrication 0.5. This is mostly a bug fix release but there are a few things that were important to implement for future development. Most important of these is the unit tests. I have implemented unit tests for most of the framework now. And fixed a few various bugs in the process.

[1] : Fabrication Test Runner
[2] : More details on CodeDrunks

peace,
darshan

Anty,

FlashModule is not needed when using flash. The FlashApplication is your entry point throughout. FlexModule is a flex specific fabrication because Flex makes a distinction between Applications and Modules. In the flash/pure as3 world there is no such distinction. A swf is a swf is a swf. ;-)

Checkout the hello_flash_with_module demo[1]. The navigation is a module loaded with a plain loader and extends FlashApplication.

peace,
darshan

[1] : http://fabrication.googlecode.com/svn/examples/hello_flash_with_module/

Hey Anty,

While I agree that the player 9 does not have means to gc. However as Jason used in his example, doing 2 local variable LocalConnection's back to back seems to force the player to do an immediate gc. Jason was doing it in his example and without Fabrication it shows the drop. Google chrome shows this quite clearly.

So I wouldn't give up on the multi-modular approach just yet. ;-) Solid garbage collection is a hugely important feature for Fabrication moving forward. Like I mentioned earlier nearly every class cleans up after itself. The gc issue is almost fixed, look out for a new release soon. And I am working on modifications to the simple_routing example to show that it actually does work!

Jason,

Regarding the debugger are you using it against the source version or the swc? With the source version I haven't seen this issue.

peace,
darshan

Hey Jason,

I had left out the concrete Model and View for later. Your example seems to be a good time to implement this. I am currently doing the units test for Fabrication. And I did discover some of the clean up issues also. A few important classes like DynamicJunction had not implemented IDisposable among others. Things are slightly broken at the moment because I am doing the unit tests after the implementation. I have to be careful about not breaking anything in stuff that is not yet tested.

Fundamentally I do not see any reason that things would not get gc'd correctly. There is extensive implementation of IDisposable throughout the framework. I will get back in a day or so with a fix.

peace,
darshan

Hey Jason,

I have committed this fix to the svn and updated to 0.4.3. Sorry it took so long.

peace,
darshan