Joel Hooks - ActionScript Developers Guide to Robotlegs

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In April 2009, Shaun Smith posted the following on his blog:

Want a framework like PureMVC but without Singletons, Service Locators, or casting? Perhaps one with Dependency Injection and Automatic Mediator Registration?

Well, you might enjoy RobotLegs AS3: yet another lightweight micro-architecture for Rich Internet Applications.

Its got the bits that I like about PureMVC (Mediators, Commands and Proxies) without any of the bits that Im not so fond of (Service Locator, Singletons, casting casting casting!)

Over the following six months, Shauns Robotlegs concept gradually picked up support, gathered momentum, and through the collective efforts of a group of people who had never met in person, Robotlegs 1.0 was born.

Open source development is well understood in our community. But we shouldnt take it for granted. I (Stray) was working on some of the diagrams for the book on a flight back from the first ever Robotlegs team meet-up, and the man next to me started asking questions about what I was doing. When I told him I was working on a book about a project that was the collective effort of strangers from all over the world, none of whom expected to be paid, he was amazed.

Robotlegs has brought coding-joy to thousands of AS3 developers. There is something about using Robotlegs that not only solves our immediate coding problems but gives us insight into our architecture on a much deeper level. Joel and I each have many, many experiences of people sharing with us how Robotlegs has clarified concepts that were previously confusing to them. After only a short time using Robotlegs, developers tell us that they have become better programmers and architects generally.

The most rewarding part of being involved with Robotlegs has been witnessing people grow as programmers to the point where they become contributors of utilities and patches for the framework. Robotlegs owes its success not just to Shaun, Till, Robert and Joel, but to the dozens of people who got involved in the early discussions, the scores who have built utilities and extensions, the hundreds of early-adopters who have written tutorials and shared their enthusiasm with others, and the thousands of users who have put their trust in the framework and given Robotlegs a shot.

Shaun could never have dreamed that his little framework idea would grow and grow until OReilly commissioned a book about it. We hope this book does justice to Robotlegs, and the collective energy that has brought it into our world.

ActionScript Developers Guide to Robotlegs is for Flash, Flex and AIR application developers interested in using, or already using, the Robotlegs AS3 framework. It demonstrates and explains the core functionality of the Robotlegs framework and also explores the deeper issues in AS3 architecture generally and how developers can solve those problems in clean and flexible ways using Robotlegs.

This book also covers testing (TDD) of Robotlegs applications, and the rich example applications come with extensive tests.