In April 2009, Shaun Smith posted the following on his blog:
Want a framework like PureMVC but without Singletons, Service Locators, or casting? Perhaps one with Dependency Injection and Automatic Mediator Registration?
Well, you might enjoy RobotLegs AS3: yet another lightweight micro-architecture for Rich Internet Applications.
It’s got the bits that I like about PureMVC (Mediators, Commands and Proxies) without
any of the bits that I’m not so fond of (Service Locator, Singletons, casting casting casting!)
Over the following six months, Shaun’s Robotlegs concept gradually picked up support,
gathered momentum, and through the collective efforts of a group of people who
had never met in person, Robotlegs 1.0 was born.
Open source development is well understood in our community. But we shouldn’t take
it for granted. I (Stray) was working on some of the diagrams for the book on a flight
back from the first ever Robotlegs team meet-up, and the man next to me started asking
questions about what I was doing. When I told him I was working on a book about a
project that was the collective effort of strangers from all over the world, none of whom
expected to be paid, he was amazed.
Robotlegs has brought coding-joy to thousands of AS3 developers. There is something
about using Robotlegs that not only solves our immediate coding problems but gives
us insight into our architecture on a much deeper level. Joel and I each have many,
many experiences of people sharing with us how Robotlegs has clarified concepts that
were previously confusing to them. After only a short time using Robotlegs, developers
tell us that they have become better programmers and architects generally.