Lieven Cardoen

Yesterday, Christophe Herreman gave us a demonstration of the Prana Framework, developed by himself. It’s an Inversion of Control (IoC) Container for ActionScript 3.0. It’s very powerfull and worth of taking a look at. I worked on a big project for Bekaert and Prana gave me the possibility to configure the application without the need of recompiling it. I could have easily done it with loading and parsing xml, but Prana basically does this automatically for you!!! If you’re working with xml, and you want to add some tags, you need to go into your code to adjust the parser and recompile again. With Prana you can add tags (objects) in your applicationContext and everything will keep on working.
I think it’s important to take a look at the examples and figuring out where you could use the Prana Framework. Especially for big projects it can be of great use. Flash used to be a tool for creating small animations, but is has grown a lot, and with Flex, big projects often choose the Flash/Flex technology.
For me, the Serializer that’s in the Prana Framework looks great. Normally Prana goes and deserialize xml into objects. However, Prana can also Serialize objects, which gives you the option to go and refractoring projects. I guess you could serialize objects into xml, enabling you to configure them in the applicationContext.xml instead of in your code… Maybe it’s not that simple, but I’ll definitely have a try.
Another great thing about Prana are the preprocessors. Certainly take a look at that, but first go and look at the more easy examples. One thing about Open Source projects is the amount of examples, documentation, … It is sometimes scarce + the fact that developers with a lot of experience have problems explaining things on the level of less experienced developers. Anyway, if I have usecases where you could use the Prana Framework in small or big projects, I’ll post them! Thx to Christophe for Prana Smana!