Waldo Smeets .com

I’m still playing around with my Table View / DataGrid component. Earlier this week I reported that I wanted it’s architecture to be more like the Macromedia UI components architecture. So I’ve been studying that architecture over and over again and I am learning lots of things from it. I am still not able to reproduce them from scratch, and implementing some techniques breaks my components, so it’s a really exciting experiment. Unfortunately I wished I had studied them before I started doing it my own way 😉 But on the other hand… it’s better for my learning experience!

One of the biggest problems I am facing now is that I still don’t get how they have split their components into so many many sub components and movieclips (Sometimes I can’t reproduce the initialization of my own assets which are designed that way). It looks like most of this is for skinning and reuseability, but it’s hard to reverse engineer. I hope to find the magic behind it soon, and I’ll let you know! At least I know for sure: all those people that have been critisizing the Macromedia UI components because they were “too easy and too huge” haven’t taken a real look into them, I am sure that they are much and much stronger then 99% of the people expect…. they seem to be build for extensibility! (I like that word 😉