Skinning MinimalComps with Degrafa
Just a quick post to show how you can utilize Degrafa and MXML to skin the MinimalComps components. Currently this adds just over 50kb to your SWF but it's on on going effort to lower this and minimize the dependencies on Flex classes.
My skin extends from GeometryGroup which instead of adding another DisplayObject to the display list it simply draws directly on the component.
I really like the idea of using AS3 for your component behavior/logic and seperating your views/skins using MXML. This is something Flex 4 is trying to achieve with FXG and it would be cool to see other frameworks do the same with Degrafa.
Using MXML without Flex (Example and Source)
I made a few minor changes to the MinimalComps project from Keith Peters and got it playing nicely with MXML. The below application compiles to a tiny 23KB yet makes use of MXML and even data binding.
I added only 2 new extra classes (Container and Application). Container simply adds the ability to add child DisplayObjects via MXML. Application extends Container and handles configuring the stage.
The only changes I made to the existing MinimalComps classes was adding a few metadata tags and modified VBox and HBox to extend Container.
View or download the full source code.
Here's the source for the main mxml file:
Note: This has nothing to do with the new framework we are building. I just wanted to show off how easy it is to use MXML without Flex.

