Parsley

I have blogged about the new data-centric features in Flash Builder 4 here and here. One question people often ask me is: “Can I use this feature if I use a Framework (Cairngorm, Mate, Parsley, Spring ActionScript, Swiz, etc)?”

The answer is yes: The classes generated by Flash Builder (Value Objects and Service Stubs) are standard building blocks that are part of most RIA design patterns, regardless of whether or not you use a framework.

The way you leverage these classes in your application may differ slightly depending on the framework you are using. For example, each framework may have a different approach to configure service endpoints or to instantiate generated service stubs.

To demonstrate this, I built a version of my “Contacts” application (also known as InSync) using the Flash Builder 4 data-centric features and the Parsley Framework.

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After my recent explorations of “Swiz”, and “Spring ActionScript” (1,2,3), I decided to take the new version of the Parsley framework for a test drive, and build the Parsley version of inSync: the simple Contact Management application I often use to try out and demonstrate different features and techniques in Flex and Adobe AIR.

Parsley is primarily a Dependency Injection framework. It also offers a very interesting messaging infrastructure. I won’t get into the details of dependency injection here: My previous Swiz and Spring ActionScript articles provide some background information, and there are also plenty of detailed resources out there.

If you just want to run the application and dive into the code, here are the links:

Click here to run the application.
Click here to view the source code.

Object Configuration

Parsley allows you to configure the core objects of your application (the objects other components depend on) in MXML (like Swiz), in XML (like Spring ActionScript), in ActionScript, or using any combination of these approaches. You can also extend the framework and create your own configuration mechanism.

For the inSync application, I used a simple MXML configuration (Config.mxml) defined as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Object xmlns="*" xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" xmlns:services="insync.parsley.services.*">

    <mx:RemoteObject
            id="contactRO"
            destination="contacts"
            endpoint="http://localhost:8400/samples/messagebroker/amf"
            showBusyCursor="true" />

    <services:ContactService />

</Object>

Note: In a real life application, you would not want to hardcode the endpoints of your services in your source code. You could use the XML configuration option to configure your endpoints in a more “externalized” fashion. More on this topic here.

Framework Initialization

You initialize the Parsley framework using the ContextBuilder class corresponding to the configuration approach you chose. Here is the main application file for the inSync application. Parsley is initialized in the preinitialize event of the application.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" xmlns:views="insync.parsley.views.*"
	paddingTop="0" paddingLeft="0" paddingRight="0" paddingBottom="0"
	preinitialize="FlexContextBuilder.build(Config)">

	<mx:Script>
		<![CDATA[
			import org.spicefactory.parsley.flex.FlexContextBuilder;
		]]>
	</mx:Script>

	<mx:Style source="styles.css" />

	<views:MainView />

</mx:Application>

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