Great pure actionscript projects: a gallery demo.

As a developer of flex applications I have often received critique for the size of the applications, and of course it could be a problem if they should be loaded fast with limited bandwidth. There are techniques for removing classes that are not needed, but another alternative is to choose a new “Actionscript project” instead of creating a new “Flex Project”. Maybe you don´t need all the fancy things from Flex: the ResourceManager, the StyleManager, and the DataGrid. Instead of building your layout with the declarative mxml you can perhaps add TextFields, SimpleButtons and other components, as well as making cool drawings in a fla file. You have to give the components instance names if you would like to access them from your application. Then embed the compiled swf into a class variable for instantiation in your application code.
I have created a simple gallery application that shows how you can use Flash for creating the gui and FlashBuilder´s "Actionscript project" for controlling it. The size of the application is just around 30 kB. Because the application is very simple and a small size was one of the goals for this project I didn´t use any MVC framework (like Robotlegs, or the modification of Swiz for plain as3 projects, from Negdis), but nevertheless followed some MVC pattern by a controller, and a model.

You can view the source code and download a zip of the application below by right clicking in the app and select “view source”.

As the integration between Flash CS5 and FlashBuilder will be heavily improved (with features like compiling a fla file from FlashBuilder), it will become more and more important to make an intelligent decision about what roles the two IDE´s should play in the next Flash project. What is the easiest thing to do? Where do we have our competences?