as3flobile update: now using as3-signals

If you have been following/using as3flobile, I just recently committed an update for v0.3 to github. The new version now utilizes as3-signals by Robert Penner for assigning delegate handling.

In the previous versions of as3flobile, interface delegates were used in order to notify subscribing clients of a change to a control. I knew i did not want to institute event dispatching in as3flobile because it was faster to notify a client through a method than going through an observer. So interface delegates were originally used. In basic terms, each control in as3flobile declared one or more optional delegates whose method(s) would be invoked when a change to the control had occured. As an example, this was the now deprecated IButtonDelegate:

public interface IButtonDelegate
{
	function buttonTapped( button:Button ):void;
}

When a client wanted to subscribe as the delegate for a tap gesture on the Button, it would point itself as the delegate for the Button:

var button:Button = new Button();
button.delegate = this;
addChild( button );
 
public function buttonTapped( button:Button )
{
trace( "button tapped: " + button );
}

I had some issues with this, but i went ahead with that implementation for the first couple versions of as3flobile. As far as how this solution stacked up:

Pros:
1. No event system. Faster execution.

Cons:
1. Only one subscribing delegate allowed.
2. No @optional interface method declarations. A delegate had to strictly adhere to the interface and declare all the methods whether or not it cared to handle them.

So the one Pro was good, but the 2nd Con really started to bother me. In some cases i started adding multiple delegate properties to a control so they could target different changes to the control. Take for instance a delegate for the scroll of a list and a delegate for the selection of a list. It started to feel cumbersome.

Then last week, i finally decide to see what as3-signals was about. Very intuitive and an excellent library. I was impressed and decided that as3-signals was a perfect fit for the delegate handling in as3flobile. So the library has moved to support that. More information is available at as3flobile on github and its wiki.

As with every project i create that has a dependency on another library, there are now two flavors of the build: Standalone and External. The Standalone is meant as a standalone library with the parts required of the dependency compiled in. The External is solely the as3flobile bits and any personal project using the External library will also need to build against the as3-signals library. The as3-signals library can be found on github.

Subsequently, the as3flobile-air and as3flobile-android extensions have been updated due to this change.

So, a big change, i know. But I think a step in the right direction. If you are using as3flobile, update and let me know how you feel about this change.

Robert Penner’s as3-signals
as3flobile on github