Chris Johnston » Flash

Adobe and Mozilla Foundation to Open Source Flash Player Scripting Engine

Chris Johnston — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 03:32:56 +0000

I have no idea what this means right now, but it has been popping up all over digg.com today. “Adobe is going to open source their ActionScript engine and donate it to the Mozilla Foundation”:http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2006-11-07.html.

bq. Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) and the Mozilla Foundation, a public-benefit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet, today announced that Adobe has contributed source code for the ActionScript™ Virtual Machine, the powerful standards-based scripting language engine in Adobe® Flash® Player, to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, to accelerate the development of this standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications.

I am not sure if this means they are open sourcing the entire Flash Player or just a small section of it. If it is just a small part of the player, I am not sure how this benefits Mozilla? Does this mean that I can now do Flash ActionScripting and expect it to run in Mozilla without having, or needing, the entire Flash player installed?

At the very least, it should be interesting to watch and see what this all means.

SWFObject: Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script

Chris Johnston — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 20:08:57 +0000

I found this link via “the List”:http://www.evolt.org and thought it was very cool. It solves a lot of problems if you are trying to add “Flash content to your web pages”:http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/.

bq. SWFObject is a small Javascript file used for embedding Macromedia Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents*, and is forward compatible, so it should work for years to come.

Make your own South Park character

Chris Johnston — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:12:33 +0000

I found a very cool little flash application via a link on the RocketBoots website. It is a South Park Studio that lets you create your own character. The app is very simple to use and a lot of fun as well. The only down side to it is that the only way to retain your character is to take a screenshot. There is no way to either save your creation on the site itself or to have a jpg emailed to you.

Here is my little creation:

Flash Remoting AS2 Component Installer Bug

Chris Johnston — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 05:09:44 +0000

I was trying to do a simple little “hello world” script in Flash MX 2004 Professional using Flash Remoting and ActionScript 2.0, but it just would not work. I knew I had installed the Flash Remoting components for ActionScript 2, but it seemed like it could not find the required files. I kept getting the following error:

class 'import mx.rpc.RelayResponder' could not be loaded

After a quick little search on Google, I found the answer. Apparently there is a bug in the installer that prevents all the files from being installed. If you are having similar problems then the solution is to download the sources and install them yourself.

Cool Software: AsUnit

Chris Johnston — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 03:29:35 +0000

AsUnit is an Open-Source, Unit Test Framework for Macromedia Flash ActionScript 2.0. It is fully integrated into the Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Professional IDE, but it’s primary features require minimal interaction with the Flash Environment.

I have not tried the software as of yet, but porting JUnit to ActionScript 2.0 and Flash can only be a good thing. The website has a link to Colin Moock’s site where he says good things about AsUnit — that’s good enough for me.

ONJava.com: Integrating Macromedia Flex with Java

Chris Johnston — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 21:40:20 +0000

ONJava has an article about integrating Flex with Java.

“Integrating Macromedia Flex with Java by Mark Eagle — Web applications don’t have to be about HTML. Rich client-side environments offer a better end-user experience but demand some rethinking of the web app client-server relationship. Mark Eagle shows how you can use Macromedia Flex to bring rich applications to Flash-equipped browsers.”