My Swiz Tryout

I’ve just given Swiz a little test-run.  I’m not going to write about how Swiz works or anything here.  There’s plenty of that all over the place by people much more skilled than myself.  But so far my experience has been very positive.  I’ve converted a medium-sized project into using it instead of a hand-rolled solution.  I’m still using a lot of the original code but since it was already in an MVC pattern it was easy to change the important bits.  I’m a big fan of my command library and have a lot of code written that depends on it.  I’m sure there are a dozen just like it out there and probably something just like it rolled into Swiz (I haven’t found out yet, mine worked without change so I didn’t.)  I was very pleased to see that they fit so smoothly into this framework.

Joe Rinehart’s post Swiz in 20 minutes was very instrimental in getting me up to speed very quickly.  I don’t often opt for video presentations over the written work (searching, rewinding, etc is so much harder) but this was so straightforward I was able to watch it once and then just flip open Eclipse and do it.  The minimal documentation on the Swiz page was helpful too of course since my memory only lasts about as long as it takes to switch from one tab to another.

But Swiz is Flex-only.  One of the benefits of Swiz is that it augments the abilities of Flex instead of replaces them.  I’m already using Flex right?  Might as well . . . use it.  But not everything I do is in Flex so I want to see if I can become familiar with a framework that will work in Flash as well and still stay out of my hair.  It’s gotta be “micro” or I just can’t bring myself to care.

Thinking of giving RobotLegs the same treatment.  It’s about to hit 1.0 and that always has a nice sound to it.  Do a quick project conversion to see how it works in a real-world situation.  Maybe Mate; I’ve got peeps that seem to like it a lot.  Any suggestions?