Development Themes

• Smaller k-weight:

One of the primary goals of OpenPyro is to keep filesize small so that these components can be used in small widget type swfs or for Flash 9+ enabled mobile divices.

• Composition rather than Inheritance:

OpenPyro components are built using the composition model rather than inheritance. This idea is similar to Flex 4, and each component is assembled by passing it a list of component parts (terminology from Flex 4). If these are not passed in, the component picks a default set to create the default UI.

• Autonomous Packages:

We are making a lot of effort to keep packages fairly autonomous. This means that if you just want to, for example, use the logging package without compiling in all the other packages, you can. The only dependency any package has is to a few classes in the com.cimians.openPyro.core package. This lets you pick and choose what functionality from openPyro you want to include in your project.

• Swappable Packages:

OpenPyro packages are swappable. This means that if you already have a particular implementation of a package’s functionality, you should be able to cross connect those with OpenPyro classes. Taking the logging example again, if you are already using an existent logging framework, you may have to implement a small interface to connect your framework with OpenPyro logging.

• Plugins:

A lot of the non core functionality will be available as plugins which you can choose to use or not. Plugins are small libraries of code that are dependent on the core library to add specific functionality for your project. These plugins can be things like Adobe AIR helpers, MVC architecture implementations, etc.

• Do not re-invent the wheel:

OpenPyro tries not to reinvent the wheel and we want to integrate projects that are already out there that the community uses (tweening libraries for example) into the code base.