Elastic Cords - Porting a Flash8 application to Flex 2
Recently Eric Dolecki published a Flash 8 version of a very cool Elastic Cords flash application. I am sure he was - as I am - inspired by the works of Andre Michelle. This application, of course, does nothing commercially practical but does demonstrate great features of the FP8 API. I, of course, decided to continue that tradition. I wanted to create a Flex, object-oriented, component version...
All too often I find great Flash applications; but their code (if published) is usually procedural and timeline-based instead of the component-based approaches that come so easily to us in Flex 2. This is to be expected since Flash 8 is a tool intended primarily for designers. While Flex is a tool oriented primarily for developers.
Porting such applications from Flash 8 to Flex 2 - where the concepts of timelines are deprecated - presents challenges. When you consider that most Flex projects are business-oriented applications that do not require dynamic stage-drawing interactions (like the Elastic Cords), then this project was the perfect impetus for me to explore and understand the conceptual differences; differences such UI interactions, tweenings, component coupling, etc..
I knew the effort would prove to be quite fun and challenging. In fact, I became obssessed first with the development efforts and then with dragging those ridiculous cords around.[So be forewarned ;-)]
Click image to run live version... requires Flash Player 9.xx
My Flex 2 version of Elastic Cords is a completely OO component-based application that uses canvases, sprites, tweens, effects, filters, bindings, and more. Run the live application and play with it. 'View Source' has also been enabled for developers to review the code, architectures, and techniques. And soon... I will provide tutorials to walk developers thru the porting process.
Interestingly enough, I had 2 options when building my Flex2 application: (1) Use a Actionscript project or (2) use a Flex project that would include the mx framework. The actionscript project would have been < 30K while the existing Flex applicaiton is ~200K. But without the mx framework, I would have lost pre-built components & containers, bindings, etc. And the resulting version is easily extendable. So the larger footprint (for the core mx libraries) was well worth it.