I’m probably one of the few ActionScript 3.0 DP users who does not develop in Flex. A while back, before Flex 2 came out, I worked with it for a while and got a lot of help on Flex 2 and DPs from Ali Mills who was doing some work for Macromedia/Adobe. Later, I learned that Ali was working on a DP book for ActionScript with Addison-Wesley publishers. (That may not have worked out.) Anyway, since the great bulk of my own development work has been with Flash CS3/ActionScript and I have not done a thing with Flex based controls I doubt that I could offer up anything other than a wild guess.

However, I am working through my Flyweight saga in an attempt to use button components as part of a FW shared object. In this process, I may run into some of the same kinds of issues with the FocusManager (Flash CS3 doesn’t seem to have a SystemManager class that’s available to the API). If I discover something useful, I’ll pass it back to you. (This is all preparation for a presentation I’m doing at OOPSLA in Montreal later this year. If you’re going, let’s talk.)

Anyway, you can contact Ali through his blog at:

http://www.alimills.com/

He’s a very smart and cool guy and may be able to help out.

Kindest regards,
Bill

I talked with Ted Patrick for a bit at 360 Flex on why Adobe didn’t go with using the decorator pattern for Flex’s controls. I know that Swing uses decoration pretty heavily for their UI components. Anyway, have you experimented with trying to decorate Flex based controls? I’ve run into a couple situations where decoration would have saved me some development time, but I couldn’t pursue it because I was running into issues with the SystemManager and FocusManager classes.

Dan