Twitter frees Flight, a web application framework

Event bubbling with Flight
Source: Twitter The microblogging and messaging company Twitter has released Flight, a web application framework based around the work the company did last year reimplementing its web frontends. The MIT-licensed framework is focused on structuring web applications around the existing DOM model, mapping its functionality onto DOM nodes and piggy-backing off the DOM's event propagation mechanisms. Flight is not tied to any web rendering technology and doesn't care how requests are routed, whether templating is in use or where the HTML is generated. Instead, it looks to ensure a clean decoupling of component functionality from the page.

Each Flight component depends on only the Flight utilities and mixin code, and only responds to and generates events. According to Twitter, this should make testing the components simple and reliable, as events are the only variable that components work with and they are easy to generate. Components can then subscribe to events on the DOM tree, as long as they are within the scope of the node. Flight comes with support for functional mixins with protection against duplicated mixins or unintentional overriding.

The developers have placed the Flight code in a GitHub repository and it comes with documentation and an email sample app and demo. Future plans include the addition of a full testing framework and further releases of utilities used to create Twitter's web front-end.

(djwm)