18.1. Putting reusability into action

At the 2009 Adobe MAX conference, lead architect of the Flex SDK Ely Greenfield did an excellent session involving Spark component architecture. He created an example for the presentation, which I liked a lot, and so I asked his permission to refactor it (the Flex 4 SDK was a lot different then) for use with this book. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to walk you through building your own custom component, dubbed Reveal by a highly respected individual in the Flash platform community, Ely Greenfield.

18.1.1. Reveal component background

Ely’s demonstration comprised a single component with nine different skins and four different implementations. His purpose was not to dig into the code line by line but rather to demonstrate one of the ways we’d benefit by the movement toward architectural design best practices for the Flex SDK. He accomplished this by showing off some crafty skin swapping and how easily he could drastically manipulate and change the display of a component without having to even touch the component class. Needless to say, Ely’s example was a perfect fit for this chapter.