Look ma, no wires!

Recently, I have been using Swiz on a couple of smaller projects that are in the works. Swiz is a great little framework that is incredibly light weight. You can see some great examples using Swiz as well as some good discussion in the google groups. I am still using 0.6.4, but the 1.0 alpha is out and offers a new direction for Swiz, especially one that I welcomes that eliminates the need to instantiate Swiz. As I understand it, you just need your Beans and SwizConfig. All other code can be written with the simple use of metadata tags, that Swiz 1.0 alpha will also be offering some neat features.

So as I was working on some items, I remembered a 20-minute Swiz video that Joe Rinheart had posted that helped me out when I first started looking at Swiz. In that video, as a shortcut, Joe had simply binded a service to a delegate inside his BeanLoader to eliminate the need to Autowire an object in a Delegate. This got me thinking about the need to use Autowire with the metadata tag in my applications. When you Autowire an object using Swiz, the object has to be public anyway. The BeanLoader is already an IoC container. So why use it? After I had read Clean Code, I began to look at keeping my code as minimal as possible to get the job done. Although, an Autowire metadata tag was no big deal, I just felt like it was one more item I could eliminate from my code.

You could accomplish this in your BeanLoader. <controls:RequestController id="requestController" eventDispatcher="{ this.dispatcher }" service="{ mockDelegate }"/>

<services:MockMainServiceDelegate id="mockDelegate" eventDispatcher="{ this.dispatcher }" />

Now I have eliminated the need to Autowire the mockDelegate object in my RequestController.

I have built a simple example that can be found here, with view source enabled. You’ll notice that I don’t use the Autowire metadata tag anywhere, allowing the BeanLoader to do the Autowire for me. Well … not quite true. I was not able to get away from using Autowire in a Mediator for my views, even if I tried to add them to my BeanLoader and bind them in there. I used a simplified version of an AbstractMediator class that Brian Riley used in his Swiz Passive View example. If anyone has any ideas as to why I had to Autowire this view, I would love to hear it, it was driving me nuts. Anyway, as you can see, all I used in my example was the Mediate metadata tag to mediate my events. That’s what I call simple and clean. As an aside, I am also using the ESRI Flex API, with some mock data that is built using the FeatureSet.convertFromJSON method, which comes in real handy. This is the main API I use for day to day work.

Now is this really necessary? Probably not, but it does keep my MVC code lean. That’s a great strength for Swiz, is the ability to adapt it to your style. This allows me to really focus on building my custom objects that will really do the grunt work that my MVC will simply delegate.