If there was a framework for Flash like PEAR is for PHP.. would you use it?

[mattkenefick]

Something that gets a standard release every so often based on regular updates, community input and submissions, packages / plugins, thorough documentation, such..

Would you use it / contribute ?

[CyanBlue]

That'd be awesome!!! Definitely... :)

Where is the fun if I don't have to reinvent the wheel on every project??? :p

[mattkenefick]

What if there was CSS in Flash? :)

Like.. You make a stylesheet of


my_mc.cssProperties = "top: 50px;
left: 50%;
marginLeft: -200px;
rotation: 30;
background: #343434 url('images/myImage.gif') repeat-x;
borderTop: 2px 00FF00 80";


And then your MC always stayed 50px from top, 50% left with a negative 200pixel margin, rotated itself 30 degrees, had a background COLOR of 0x343434, but with a bitmap smoothed image of "images/myImage.gif" that only repeated horizontally even if you scale the MC. Oh and a 2px border on the top that was green at 80% opacity that didn't scale with the MC

=]

[CyanBlue]

That'd be nice as long as the CSS in Flash is the same... Sometimes people tends to add their own implementation and that's where all the confusions comes from, if you ask me... ;)

[mattkenefick]

It is.
And works pretty well I must say.

[CyanBlue]

Sounds very nice... :)

[jsebrech]

The problem with frameworks is often that they're not generic/customizable enough, and it doesn't end up being worthwhile to use them. For example, PEAR seems nice on the surface, but I've been able to use very little of it because often it isn't easy to extend in the direction I need, or it doesn't really cover my specific needs. Another example: we ended up building our own calendar control despite there being dozens of javascript calendar controls, because none of them were what we needed.

Stylesheets would be handy, but, my employer's web applications use a set of cascading styles: built-in style > general customer-specific style > module-specific customer-specific style. The customer stylesheets override the built-in style, and the sheets come from a separate directory. If you just implement CSS styling in flash, odds are that it wouldn't allow such a way of working.

So, the answer is: yes, a good framework would get used by a lot of people. However, "good" is very difficult to realize.

[mattkenefick]

But you also have to realize that a "good" framework still involves programming.

As for PEAR, I don't think you've looked into it enough. It's incredibly handy and has a very large user base. There's a lot of books, tutorials, and such that rely on it. Many O'Reilly books included.

Why would the styling not work?

The way it works is you load or hard code a stylesheet like you do with CSS then it applies it. You would load your base styles, load general styles, then if you need to, load module styles and it'll take precedent over the other styles. They wouldn't conflict.

Ie.. If my General style said that the background should be black, then the module said the background should be red.. Whatever is loaded last will take precedent and the background will be red.