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Just posted the next Los Angeles Flex User Group event. Spread the word, tell a friend, tell a co-worker!

Spring ActionScript allows you to inject dependencies into your MXML components as they’re added to the stage. By default, it ignores any components whose namespace starts with either ‘flash.*’ or ‘mx.*’, so it only looks at your custom components. Since Flex 4 introduces a new ’spark’ namespace, you’ll need to override the default flexStageObjectSelector, which is as simple as adding this to your application context XML:

<object id=”flexStageObjectSelector” class=”com.classes.objectselectors.MyCustomObjectSelector”/>

I extended the default flexStageObjectSelector and added a few lines so that it also ignores ’spark.*’. The code for that class is below. Just drop it somewhere in your project and update the class attribute in the object tag above and you’ll be good to go. The Spring ActionScript documentation is very helpful and explains how you can extend it even further.

This Wednesday, 8/12, I’ll be giving a talk on Flex application architecture and how Spring ActionScript changes everything. Details here.

Seeing this news, I have to wonder.  Using their own player instead of Flash would allow them to push a new version any time they modify the codec in a way that reduces bandwidth (aka saves them money).  If they continue to rely on Flash Player, they have to wait roughly 18 months for new versions to come out, assuming Adobe continues to license new versions of the On2 codec.

When YouTube requires a new Flash Player version, people download it immediately, so I don’t think there would be much resistance to installing a new Google video plugin.  For embeds, they could still use Flash Player for a while until market penetration of the Google Player was high enough, or they could add a new embed option in addition to the Flash embed.

Is there any reason they wouldn’t build their own player?

[Update] This article may shed more light on their plans.