MX v 2 Components Patch

Many people use the Macromedia Flash MX V.2 Components to create user interfaces for their flash applications.

Since Open Source UI frameworks (like ActionStep) aren’t released yet, Flash Developers have no worthy alternative in choosing the most comfortable and functional UI library with which to satisfy all their needs. Another issue is the absence of UI builder tools for existing Open Source frameworks.

Consequently, Flash developers are often forced to use Macromedia’s UI framework.

However, because of the extremely poor quality of the V2 Components source code, it’s practically impossible to use it together with other open source tools.

One of the most prominent issues is not being able to use MX source code with the MTASC SWF compiler. The coding standards used in the V2 Components code are incompatible with those of MTASC so its parser produces numerous warning and error messages.

But even updated MX code compiled with MTASC won’t make SWF work properly. Because of differences in class registration order and using initialization code from assets inside SWF’s library, component skins are initialized incorrectly. As a result components may be displayed only partly or not at all.

So currently it is not possible to use MTASC to compile a SWF that uses the Macromedia V2 Components.

MTASC has a special -mx option that allows the skipping of MX classes during SWF compilation and leaves it as is. But in practice, the inability to properly compile MX classes with MTASC makes its use inconvenient and seriously limits the area of its application.

Provided patch serves for two purposes:
- Makes MX sources compatible to FDT IDE, ASDT IDE and MTASC compiler syntax checkers.
- Contains special fixes allowed to create correctly worked flash applications contained MX V2 Components using MTASC.
So using this patch Flash Developer could feel the power and freedom of the open source development applied to MX solutions framework.