Just a year ago we were stuck with v2 components, and lots were dissatisfied with this state of affairs. Well, behold, as there are an ever-increasing amount of contenders in the battle for component dominance.

The first commercial offering was in the AS2 arena was Keith Peters’ bit component set, now available through FlashLoaded. They’re lightweight and fast at a reasonable 99$. I’ve worked with them on commercial projects, and I’d say that while they are a bit limited and miss the obvious datagrid, they’re perfect for ‘mixed’ projects incorporating both animation and RIA elements; designers I’ve worked with found them quite simple to skin.

Then there are the eternally delayed mCom/GLIC components from Grant Skinner, available through Metaliq. These are robust, lighter than the v2 components and include most of the components of the v2 framework, including the DataGrid, at a cool 399$. There’s no Window component, documentation has been reported as sparse, intrinsics have to be extracted by hand, and at that price I’m expecting some comprehensive layout classes which are missing. These could have been handy when they were announced a year ago, but with the recent surge of open source component frameworks, and at that price, some are left wondering what’s the gPoint…

The very first open source components to be released, I believe, were the SMX components by the BBC. These are lightweight, easily skinnable components in the same vein as the bit component set. There hasn’t been much movement on this one since the first release, however, I am confident of their robustness as they were deployed in real-world apps for BBC’s site during the US elections.

Then there was enFlash. This one includes liquid layouts, zooming features, XML mapping and whatnot. Definitely geared more towards programmers and making robust RIAs. The examples look quite impressive. Definitely one to watch.

Then came ActionStep. It is both a component set and a layout and application toolkit based on NextStep/Cocoa. So instead of reinventing the wheel, these guys are porting it. No release yet but lots of activity in the SVN, some working examples have been shown and look promising. All in all very interesting.

Recently ASwing was announced, in the same vein as ActionStep but this time based on Java’s Swing project. The layout classes certainly look interesting and some working examples and tutorials have already been posted.

About an hour ago a yet unnamed component library was announced by David Karam on the osFlash list, with an example page. Definitely a mighty fine example of a DataGrid in there that puts MM’s implementation to shame. David has asked for other people’s help as well as osFlash project hosting so expect to hear a lot more about that. If you’re willing to help out, send an email on the list.

For the two people out there still using AS1 there’s Ghostwire studios’ AS1 components available. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ghostwire woke up and rewrote these to a more robust AS2 framework with strict typing.

So where does this leave us? We have no less than 7 projects offering alternatives to MM’s v2 components. A few of these will die; I wouldn’t want to wish bad luck to anyone but c’est la vie… A few will definitely catch on and perhaps force Macromedia to update their components, just in time for… Flash 9. Of course by then we’ll all be using Sparkle but what can you do ;)

Seriously, I expect a lot of good stuff coming out of the ActionStep and ASwing projects, for the simple fact that the class design is already done and proven. Perhaps the XML equivalence and zoom features offered by enFlash could be merged into these. David Karam has obviously done a lot of excellent work on his components and I wouldn’t be surprised if other projects incorporate his innovations. Designer-oriented components also have a place and I will continue to use Keith’s components while watching the SMX project. Commercial support is nice but for a lot of us, it’s a lot easier to fix the code ourselves and submit a patch than working around a missing or misimplemented feature while waiting for support. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a commercial product offering open source code for the best of both worlds. Lots of exciting stuff in the works for sure.