March 2009 MN.swf Meeting March 10, 2009

Jonathan Doklovic will be leading the March meeting on the subject of using custom AS3 metadata as Java-style annotations.

Basically, you can include your own metadata tags similar to the built-in [Event] and [Bindable] tags and do something with them at runtime. This opens up a whole bunch of possibilities and I'd like to discuss/see what uses we can come up with.

The most obvious use case for custom metadata is within a unit testing framework. Some available frameworks already use custom metadata to allow you to define test methods instead of having to use a naming convention. example:

//old flexunit style
testSomeValueExists():void

//metadata style
[Test]
someValueExists():void

Jonathan will be providing some utility classes to make it easier to discover the metadata at runtime. In the meantime, here are a few links to get you started:

http://blog.gtuhl.com/2007/03/05/flex2-custom-metadata/

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=showdetails&productId=2&postId=11907

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