ActionScript Developer's Guide to Robotlegs

Preface

Robotlegs: Something a little bit special

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.

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

Over the following six months, Shaun’s 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 shouldn’t 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 ...