A New Series on Understanding and Using the Swiz Framework for Flex

As part of my commitment to blog more often in 2009, I'm starting an ongoing series on the Swiz framework for Flex. If you aren't aware, Swiz is the brianchild of Chris Scott, and may CF'ers will recognize him from this work on the ColdSpring framework. Being the brilliant guy that he is, he's taken many of the principles of Spring and ColdSpring and applied them to Flex development. The result is Swiz, and after doing work with Cairngorm, Swiz is like being paroled! It feels pretty nice to do things simply with Swiz that would have required large amounts of boilerplate code in Cairngorm.

At Broadchoice, we chose Swiz as the framework to underpin our Workspace application. As a result, I've had a good amount of time to get familiar with Swiz and try out some of it's bleeding-edge features. What I'd like to do is share what I've learned about it, with two main goals: To explain how it is useful to folks not familiar with it (or even with Flex for that matter). And second, to try and get some discussion going among those already using Swiz to see if I can learn more from them, and vice versa.

I've chosen to examine and work through a fairly simple (though non-trivial) Flex application that uses Swiz. Over the coming days and weeks I'll be blogging about various pieces of the application and what Swiz is doing. I figure it will end up being about 7 or 8 blog entries, but we'll see how it goes and what sort of comments and response I get.

Just to create a starting point to work up from, here are some of the topics I plan to talk about. Each of these is incorporated in the sample application I'm building, so we'll do more than simply talk about these, we'll put them to use.

• Getting a Swiz application running
• Swiz dependency injection and autowiring
• Using the Swiz Central Dispatcher for events
• Dynamic Responders
• Using the MockAsyncToken to simulate remote server requests
• Dynamic Mediators
• Dynamic Commands
• The Fluint unit testing framework for Flex
• Integrating Swiz into Fluint to ease testing

I have a few other ideas for topics that I may throw in or add as tangents, but let's see how this initial roadmap goes. I'll be working on the app as we go, so I'll primarily be posting code in the blog entries, and then at the end I'll push a finalized zip file of the application for folks to download and play with. The first entry will up in the next day or so. What do you folks think? Anyone out there ready to dig into Swiz with me?