Dynamic Flash

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.