clean up your garbage

We don't live in an ideal world where flash player's garbage collector understands our brilliant ideas and our incredibly genius way of coding flex applications.
As you may already know, using weak event listeners with modules and pop-ups often results in memory leaks. It's really painful to fully remove modules from memory if in-line styles, effects or focus enabled controls are present in the module.
Unfortunately, it's all up to the individual developer. Here in Lab49 we use IDisposable interface that every disposable domain object, presentation model or view should implement.

 
package com.lab49.core
{
   public interface IDisposable
   {
      function dispose() : void;
   }
}
 

The main concept is very simple - every parent cleans up itself, its presentation model and calls 'dispose' method on its children if it's applicable.

 
<myComp
   implements="com.lab49.core.IDisposable"
   layout="absolute"
   close="dispose()">;
   <![CDATA[
	      import com.lab49.core.IDisposable;
	      import com.lab49.example.model.BasePresentationModel;
 
	      [Bindable]
	      public var model : BasePresentationModel;
 
	      public function dispose() : void
	      {
	         //remove all event listeners here, stop all effects, clean up model
	         if ( model )
	         {
	            model.dispose();
	         }
	         //Clean up children
	         var children : Array = getChildren();
	         for each( var child : DisplayObject in children )
	         {
	            if ( child is IDisposable )
	               IDisposable( child ).dispose();
	         }
	      }
   ]]>
</script>