Sunday, September 21, 2008

Swiz updates and documentation!

You may have heard (certainly not here!) about a little Flex framework I have been working on called Swiz. Although I have been a tiny bit quiet around here, I have been extremely actively developing and using Swiz, as well as traveling out to 360|Flex to do a session, and trying to get the word out on a few podcasts. Well, today I REALLY need to get cracking on the blogging, and luckily I have a few updates to share. First off, I just added a section to the Swiz documentation on DynamicMediators as well as updated the project setup page. Here's a quick rundown of the changes for the week.

At 360|Flex I learned that the Flex 3 SDK will automatically include custom metadata compiled into a library. So now there is no reason to add the additional compiler arguments unless you are using the Flex 2 SDK. Also, there has been a little confusion between the first swc I posted and the latest about how to get Swiz properly initialized. The correct method is to call Swiz.loadBeans( [ loaders ] ) in a function that is invoked in your main application on preinitialize. This will allow Swiz to load all of your beans before any views are added to stage and then autowire your views as they are added.

The major new addition, however, is the new DynamicMediators, which I showed at 360|Flex. Basically this function allows your controllers to respond to event dispatching by just adding an annotation to the function that you would like invoked. Check out the documentation for a full explanation. In the coming weeks I am going to put together a short series of blog posts walking you through the setup and usage of Swiz, but for now, head on over the the google code site, and if you are interested, join the user group and provide feedback to help Swiz grow!

Friday, September 12, 2008

Big news from ColdSpring!!

I've got big news for everyone on this fine September day! Really big news! I know many of you all have been patiently waiting for the final release of ColdSpring 1.2. Well after a long time of tweaking and testing, the team has delivered! I am proud to announce the public release of ColdSpring 1.2!! But hold on to your hats, that's not the only announcement today! When you head on over to www.coldspringframework.org to download 1.2, you will be pleasantly greeted with a brand new site!!!

Congratulation and a huge thank you to everyone involved! I'd like to especially thank Rachel Maxim (Lehman) for the awesome work on the site design, Kurt Wiersma for the Mach-ii powered implementation, Adam Lehman for the hosting, and Brian Kotek for documentation, bug fixes and general leadership in this release process. Awesome work everyone! Enjoy!