Gravity for Flash
No, I’m not talking about a physics engine for Flash. Turns out if you call something Gravity, you run into a lot of search engine collision with this other force.
Anyway, I just wanted to link to a post by Stacy Young on some tech they’re demoing at MAX next week, called Gravity.
What’s significant about Gravity is that it lets you build Flex components that can be hosted by other Flex components, even if the components were built with different versions of the Flex SDK.
One of the reasons Microsoft has been so successful as a developer platform is because of the binary compatibility that COM enabled that let developers distribute components that other developers could use, even if they weren’t using the same compilers, frameworks, toolsets, or whatever. Anyone who followed the protocol could create a COM object, and anyone who followed the protocol could use it.
Now, I don’t know that much about Gravity but I’m going to go ahead and say it might bring some of that to Flex, be it in the browser or on the desktop via AIR.
And, it’s inspired by OSGi (as in, it’s as OSGi as you can get in Flex), which will make it familiar to you if you’re already familiar with OSGi. (I suspect folks who read my blog are more familiar with COM than OSGi – they’re conceptually similar although different enough that someone will want to beat me up for saying that).