ActionScript Developer's Guide to Robotlegs

Chapter 1. Robotlegs is a lightweight framework for ActionScript 3

By lightweight we mean that it’s a handy pocket knife that can get a lot of jobs done, not a complete toolkit that can attend to every eventuality. Robotlegs has a very focussed scope—facilitating the relationships between the objects in your application.

By framework we mean that it provides a skeleton for your application. The majority of your code will be specific to your project, but underneath that unique body sits a set of bones which are broadly the same each time. These bones allow the different parts of your application to function as a coherent system.

What does Robotlegs actually do?

The term framework is used very loosely in our community, referring to anything from The Flex Framework to jQuery or Ruby on Rails. The definition of a framework is simply:

A reusable set of libraries or classes for a software system.

This doesn’t really tell you much at all about what any particular framework does and doesn’t do.

Robotlegs is a communication-and-cooperation framework

In an AS3 application, objects can communicate and cooperate in two different ways:

Direct conversation

One object has a direct reference to another object, and it calls its API (its public methods) to communicate and cooperate with it.

Passing messages

In AS3, this takes the form of the event system. One object can listen for a message, in the form of an Event, on another object. Typically this means that the listening is done directly, but it doesn’t ...