--- In [email protected], "Peter Farland" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Tom is correct. The compiler starts out from the root class (i.e. > typically your subclass of mx.core.Application) and resolves types as > needed. Types can be found in source path(s) or library path(s). This is > why mxmlc enforces the "one public definition per file" rule and also > establishes the convention of "a sub-package is a sub-directory" as it > makes type resolution from sources predictable. Both of these > conventions are Flex specific and not inherent to the ActionScript 3.0 > language.
It is interesting to know how the flex compiler works, thank you for the explanation. > If it were the other way around then I guess you would have to create a > project that explicitly added each source to the configuration (if we > were to scan all sources then ActionScript include fragments would be > invalid definitions etc...). That would seem more of an effort to me... > If the tool were changed to scan all types, including non-referenced > types, for [RemoteClass] metadata then your SWF would be unnecessarily > large because you would start embedded classes that you never intended > to use. Peter, why should the size of the SWF increase unnecessarily including all the classes marked with [RemoteClass] metadata? I suppose that the great majority of the framework's classes don't make use of this feature, so the only additional classes included in the binary would be the project-specific ones, and this seems exactly the expected behaviour to me - tipically those classes are the DTOs of my application and I'll likely need them anyway. I still think that referencing all the classes by hand in my code is not really a viable solution.. even if I choose to declare a reference for every server object I work with in my MXML components, I have also to declare a reference for each subclass of it (my DTOs are usually extending other ones), and this is not the level of knowledge of my services that I want to keep in mind when coding a Flex front-end for them. As I said in a previous post, a way to include an entire package of classes (compiler switch/ide support) would at least allow us to setup this when starting a new project and then to forget about it. Anyway, I think Flex is a great product, and this is probabily the only real issue I found until now :) Cosma
