This is a “what do you think” post. I have my thoughts, will cover it briefly in a sec, but I want to know what others think about this topic.

First, a common code library is merely a way of saying the company or group you work for has a common code library which all files are based on/reference. So, you have a common DisplayObject class which extends EventDispatcher. That’s a reference to a lot of things you see in AS2 since a common event dispatcher wasn’t available, etc but I’m not restricting this to AS2.

So, what does your team do for a common library? Source control? Networked location? Do you even use one or does everyone go Commando on it?

Where does this come from? Well, I’ve been at LLNW for a few weeks now and the first thing I noticed was the lack of a common library. Without giving away too many details there are 3 different FLAs which do the EXACT same thing and all 3 had the same code duplicated in multiple files. So, the developer in me was pretty irritated having to make quick updates to fix bugs to numerous files.

Since then I have rewritten a few apps there and the main thing I did was create a common library, hosted in the UI teams Subversion repo. This has opened up the ability to share code across applications. All of this is AS2 code right now but I have started an AS3 library as well.

Over my years of contracting I only met 1 company where I didn’t have to write every line from scratch and that was “Terralever”:https://www.terralever.com. They really have their stuff together and their library is massive, including a lot of their own code and code from the community. This is what I’m attempting to achieve at LLNW so when/if we hire more Flash developers they can hit the ground running by viewing the asdoc generated docs and looking through the library.

Back to you, the reader(s). I’m more-so interested in seeing what other people do and what is approach is taken for file access.