Getting Started with Robotlegs

Robotlegs has been gaining a lot of ground over the last few months within the Flash community, and so I thought it was about time I gave it a shot. This post includes some of the resources I found really useful when getting started with the framework.

What is Robotlegs?

If you haven’t heard of Robotlegs before there’s a good explanation on their website:

Robotlegs is a pure AS3 micro-architecture (framework) with a light footprint and limited scope. Simply put, Robotlegs is there to help you wire your objects together. It provides the glue that your application needs to easily function in a decoupled way. Through the use of automated metadata based dependency injection Robotlegs removes boilerplate code in an application. By promoting loose coupling and avoiding the use of Singletons and statics in the framework Robotlegs can help you write code that is highly testable.

Robotlegs was heavily influenced by PureMVC, another pure AS3 micro-architecture framework, therefore if you are familiar with the roles and architecture PureMVC has then you will find Robotlegs easy to pick up. You will also notice that there’s a helluva lot less boiler-plate code in Robotlegs!

Where should I start?

A lot of people recommend getting started with the Robotlegs best practices document and whilst this is a good place to start it can be really overwhelming, even for someone familiar with frameworks, so I’d recommend watching the following video tutorials first.

• RobotLegs Hello World Video Tutorial by John Lindquist
• Robotlegs MVCS: Walkthrough of an AIR Twitter Client by Joel Hooks

Once you watched the videos you’ll have an rough understanding of each of the roles within Robotlegs; this is a great time to check out the best practices document and build on that knowledge. If you then watch the video tutorials again you should really understand exactly what’s going on!

What’s next?

Start using it! You can download the latest release version from the Robotlegs website or, if you’re familiar with GitHub, you can fork the repository. There’s some really useful demos available on GitHub too, which include examples of using the framework with Flash, modular development and the integration of services such as Flickr and GoogleMaps.

Don’t forget, if you’re really stuck you can always ask for help!