Flex 4 Air 2 RSL (Runtime Shared Libraries)

Question

Hi,

Has anyone got any experience will loading SWC / SWZ's at runtime within a Flex 4 / Air 2 desktop application?

The very rough idea would be to have a desktop Air app, which is able to "download" additional modules (eg, a SWZ/RSL representing a form) and load these at runtime?

Imagine the App is configured using an XML file obtained over the net. When this has instruction to get a new module (SWZ/RSL), the app will download the module to its App Storage folder, and instanciate it at runtime?

The Flex Manual seems to indicate this is possible, but is talking web rather than desktop http://help.adobe.com/en_US/flex/using/WS2db454920e96a9e51e63e3d11c0bf69084-7fd1.html

Can anyone offer any advise? Has anyone got any experience, or knows of some walkthroughs / code examples?

Thanks,

Henry

Answer 1

You will probably want to use Flex Modules for this. Here is an old blog that walks through using Modules in an AIR app:
http://blogs.adobe.com/emalasky/2008/04/remote_plugins.html

Answer 2

Just expanding on what James wrote - Modules are the way to go here.

And, although the docs for modules talk about a web scenario, there's no reason this wouldn't work with AIR also.

You might need to write some custom code to first check to see if the module already exists in the local storage, and if not, download it and store it. However, from there, you should be good-to-go.

However, remember that this approach you won't get the native updater behaviour you get out-of-the-box with AIR. You'd need to roll-your-own support for checking to see if a newer version of a module thats been previously cached is available.