BIT-101 [2003-2017]

I’ve been a PrimalScript addict for a few months now, after being hooked by Chafic. I create all my classes in it, but still wound up doing a lot of setup work in the Flash IDE for creating instances, laying out stuff, etc. Occasionally I’d throw in an #include to an external .as file, but that never felt exactly right.

At the O’Reilly table at FlashForward, I picked up the little preview booklet of ActionScript 2.0 Essentials. I’d read the excerpts before on line, but had another look at them. Now I’ve converted a few of my projects to implement an application class. The class does all the set up and layout and instantiation. You start it with a public static main() function, where you can pass in some parameters. My projects now look something like this:

On the timeline:

sourceURL="project.xml";
MyApplication.main(_root, sourceURL);

and the class:

class MyApplication {
   // var declarations
   private var __parentClip:MovieClip;
   private var __sourceURL:String;
   public function MyApplication(clip:MovieClip, url:String){
      __parentClip = clip;
      __sourceURL = url;
      init();
   }
   private function init(){
      // load xml, attach or create clips/components to __parentClip, etc.
      // call other private functions as needed
   }
   public static function main(clip:MovieClip, url:String){
      var app = new MyApplication(clip, url);
   }
   // other functions as needed
}

I know it’s not the ONLY way to do things, but I’m liking it!