Scott Mebberson

I’ve been intrigued about the Flex framework called MATE ever since I stumbled across it, some months ago. The guys at asfusion.com have always been expert Flex / ActionScript developers and the MATE framework they’ve developed is no exception.

I decided to use MATE rather than Cairngorm in a personal project I’m working on, to check it out in a real world environment (there’s nothing like going beyond examples and prototypes to determine if a framework actually works beyond design patterns and theory).

So far, I’m very impressed.

It’s light weight, easy to integrate, and has a tag to suit almost any situation and many common design patterns. Within half an hour, I had MATE integrated into my project, dispatching events and updating the model.

I did however come across an interesting problem which had me stumped for a while. I’m working on an AIR application in which I have a preferences window (via a NativeWindow popup) which creates, stores and modifies preferences for the application (yes, I’m using as3preferenceslib).

The basic idea behind MATE is to dispatch events and respond to those with changes to the Model using dependency injection to keep your views notified of the changes. All of this happens via a tag called EventMap (MATE is a tag-based framework) which is used to respond to events, change the model and inject changes to data into views. Basically, you whack the EventMap tag into your Application.mxml, use the standard dispatchEvent and magically, everything works.

Unless you’re view is used in a popup window and you want to use MATE events and the model.

The reason being popup windows within AIR have an entirely different displayList to the Application displayList and your EventMap won’t be able to intercept events dispatched using the standard disptachEvent.

After some poking around in the MATE documentation (which is very good by the way) I found a Dispatch tag, which can also be instantiated via ActionScript. So, I simply made an instance of Dispatch and used the dispatchEvent method and once again, magically, everything worked.

var countdownEvent : CountdownEvent = new CountdownEvent(CountdownEvent.SET);
countdownEvent.countdown = event.newValue;

var d : Dispatcher = new Dispatcher();
d.dispatchEvent(countdownEvent);