One of the most useful sessions I attended at 360Flex was Rob Rusher’s session on localization of Flex applications. All the sessions were great but this one applied directly to a project I’m working on. In the session Rob gave an overview of the BabelFX framework and explained how to get it set up and working.

After returning from 360 one of my next tasks was actually to implement localization into the new architecture I’m putting together. BabelFX is great because is uses an IoC approach to inject your view layer with localized textual values, pulled from resource bundles. It’s nice because you aren’t required to have a bunch of ResourceManager calls in your codebase. You simply add IDs to your view layer controls and components and BabelFX will then inject the various properties on them with the localized strings.

I’m still getting everything set up and have yet to explore the more sophisticated features available through BabelFx but so far it’s working great! Everything boils down to a Map that you create that basically maps properties from your resource bundles to controls in your view layer. It’s basically a Context and somewhat like a Front Controller. For large, complex applications you can use multiple Contexts to keep things organized and clean.

I’d recommend that you take a minute and check out BabelFX if you are localizing any Flex apps. It can be added to existing applications or used from the start of the development cycle. You can grab the source here, get the SWC here and I’d recommend starting with this example to see the uber basics.

I’d like to thank Thomas Burleson, the author of BabelFx for his time and help this week. He was very generous and gave me a hand getting things up and running. Thanks again man!! Really appreciate the assistance!!!

Thomas should be posting a new tutorial and video for getting things up and running with BabelFx soon. I’ll also probably put together a MEGA simple example sometime in the near future.