ActionStep Session at O'Reilly Open Source Conference

Session Description

Note : These notes are taken during the session, and I havent had a chance to spell check them yet.

• Overview
• Motivations
  • Building desktop app that used flash and had to be cross platform
  • Needed a full widget / component model
  • Needed to be small and have a plugin architetchure
  • Themable at runtime
  • Open source
  • Driven remotely by Ruby
• Why Flash
  • Proprietary, but
  • Published specification, with license
  • pervasive runtime
    • cross browser
    • cross platform
  • talking about the player not the IDE
  • Good Technology
    • stack based VM
    • ActionScript
    • Networking support
    • Good animation engine
    • MTASC made things much easier / better to develop
• State of Flash (7,8 soon)
  • ActionScript 2.0
    • ECMA SCriptlanguage
      • dynamic
  • V2 Components
    • source is avalible
      • remoting
      • themable
  • Flex
    • declariative
    • server based (soon to be in a tool?)
• What is in a SWF?
  • Library
    • Contains reusable assets
  • Frames / timelines
  • ActionScript Bytecode
  • Components
    • hybrid - contain
      • ActionScript
      • Graphics
• Problems once they tried to use Macromedia components
  • Had problems loading multiple movie clips each with their own library
  • Assets were overriding previous one (that had already loaded)
  • This caused problems for having a plugable environment
• Decided to build their own UI Toolkit
  • Decided to base it on NextStep - OpenStep - Cocoa
    • Published API
    • Well thought out widget model
      • views and cells,targets and actions,responder chain
    • Multiple implimentations
      • cocoa
      • gnustep
    • Inheretence + good delegation model
    • Built to support dynamic runtime features
      • originally built in objective-c
• Introducing ActionStep
  • AS 2 implimentation of a subset of the OpenStep Application kit
  • Goal is to create an open source component framework for writing Rich Internet Applications for the Flash Player
  • Based on BSD license
• ActionStep
  • Direct port of openstep appkit++
  • Pure AS2 (MTASC Compiled)
  • No assets, all components drawn
  • Tried to match method naming
• Code Example
• Demo
• Roadmap
  • End of august first alpha
  • 1.0 by end of year
  • web stack integration
    • Open-source flash remoting + ruby on rails
      • One SWF to load, then rails would deliver components into the client
    • Dynamic serialized UI descriptors
    • Target / Actions,Delegates - controllers
• Ruby on Rail into SWF
  • Pretty cool. API in Ruby on Rails that is basically generating the UI in Flash dynamically. Tied closely to the server.
  • client / server can share events,and send events to each other

All of ActionStep framework compiles to 100k