Dynamic Flash

Macromedia have released an update to Director MX 2004, adding Flash Player 8 support to the Flash Xtra. This means that all of the new expressive features of the Flash Player 8 release – video alpha masks, filters, PNG loading, etc – can now be used in a Flash movie hosted in a Director project.

The update does not include support for the ExternalInterface API, which is unfortunate because communication between Flash and Director is flaky at best. The new ExternalInterface API was designed to allow Flash and its host application to communicate easily in a synchronous way, and I can’t help but think that Adobe has missed a trick by not including support for this as part of the update. Instead we’re stuck with trapping the calls to getURL, decoding the data manually and then returning data by calling a Flash function on the root timeline. Not satisfactory.

Also concerning is the lack of V2 component support as reported in the Flash 8 Asset Xtra Documentation Addendum. I can’t see what would make the V2 components incompatible with Director, but this is a serious barrier to building a Director shell to host cross-platform Flash applications. The likes of Zinc and mProjector have limited feature sets, whereas Director has a long list of Xtras that can be used to give your application extra functionality. However, without support for the V2 components it’ll be hard to develop Director-hosted Flash applications.

All in all this is a good release, but I think Adobe could and should have gone further. This was an ideal opportunity to support all the functionality that Flash 8 has to offer, and only supporting a subset of those is a little disappointing.

At Featurecreep HQ we’re working hard on the next release of our Content Management System. Part of the new architecture was the ability to load in custom screens as and when necessary instead of compiling them all into the main SWF file.

These external screen SWFs needed to be compiled against all of the core SiteManager classes that are loaded as part of the main SWF, but without actually having these classes compiled into each external SWF. Since we’re using MTASC we had a couple of options, but the most promising was to use intrinsic versions of the core classes.

Given the number of core classes in our system we decided that creating these classes manually was going to be too much of a headache; any change to the core classes would have to also be reflected in the intrinsic versions also lest they fall out of sync. We needed to find a way to automatically generate the intrinsic classes directly from the source files.

A while ago I started an osflash project called asigen for exactly this purpose. Unfortunately nobody showed any interest in the tool (probably because I didn’t shout about it too much) and because I didn’t have a specific need for it at the time development stalled once I got the main ActionScript 2.0 code parsing module written.

I’ve recently picked up development again and I’m proud to say that asigen is now approaching beta quality. We’ve been using this tool at work for a while now and I’d like to start working towards a full 1.0 release, so I thought it was about time to get some help with testing (that’s where you come in ;o). If you have a need for a tool like this, please download asigen, give it a spin and let me know how it works out. Or not, as the case may be.

Find out more information on asigen, including links to the latest nightly builds and usage instructions, on the asigen page on osflash.