Comments on: Component Architecture, Two Approaches

By: Jacob Wright

Jacob Wright — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:46:14 +0000

Josh and Jake, I agree too. I think we can have a nice interface that passes the buck along under-the-hood to objects it is composed of. Best of both worlds.

Not saying this is actual implementation, but something in the component like:

public function scrollUp():void
{
scrollBehavior.scrollUp();
}

Thanks for your comments. We’ve got a lot of interest and it is exciting to be gaining momentum.

By: Jake Hawkes

Jake Hawkes — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:05:37 +0000

I guess by stating my preference for composition I’m just declaring myself a component creator. But I agree with Josh.

Realistically you could create all the Legos, and then also build a component out of them. This would allow the “component user” to use the polished component, and allow the “component creators” to use the individual Legos to build his own component.

If you just build entire components then you’re recreating Flex (to a certain extent) and there’s nothing interesting about that. But if you were to build the Legos, I could see myself giving up Flex altogether to get in on that action!

I love OpenFlux, and I haven’t used Stealth but I’ve looked at the source code and it looks pretty good to me. I’m looking forward to what you guys come up with.

And for the record, my favorite names I’ve heard for the framework are Phoenix and Zoe/Zoey … not sure why.

By: Josh McDonald

Josh McDonald — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:09:56 +0000

I think this begs the question “are the two approaches really mutually exclusive?” I don’t think they are. I believe that in most cases, there’s nothing but lazyness (which to be honest is usually better described as shortcomings in the toolset) that keeps developers going for inheritance rather than composition, and few rather than many composable interfaces.