What is RSL (Runtime shared library ) used for in flash?

Question

Kindly note I am not asking what SWCs are used for, I know about that.

I want to know, the use of RSLs in flash. Say i have some useful classes which i currently am using by specifying the particular folder as an "Additional source folder".

So, can i make use of RSL here. If not, when and why i need to use RSLs ( I use SWCs without any problem, but i wanna know how to make use of RSL, without making SWCs, ie just by bunch of actionscript classes )

Thanks V.

Answer 1

I would suggest reading Adobe's Introduction to RSLs:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/flex/using/WS2db454920e96a9e51e63e3d11c0bf674ba-7fff.html

One way to reduce the size of your applications' SWF files is by externalizing shared assets into stand-alone files that can be separately downloaded and cached on the client. These shared assets can be loaded and used by any number of applications at run time, but are transferred only once to the client. These shared files are known as Runtime Shared Libraries or RSLs.

When multiple applications share a core set of components or classes, clients can download those assets only once as an RSL rather than once for each application. The RSLs are persisted on the client disk so that they do not need to be transferred across the network a second time. The resulting file size for the applications can be reduced. The benefits increase as the number of applications that use the RSL increases.