Comments on: Thoughts on SWX, Flash and Hacking Code

By: Frank F.

Frank F. — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 09:11:37 +0000

I canâ€™t help but feel that thereâ€™s much more fun to be had in playing the game, experimenting, making mistakes even, than sitting, easily-hidden in the crowd, criticising, and nay-saying. Life would thus be a lot more serious and even less-inspiring if all observers were of this nature. You can sit and observe all you like, but if youâ€™re not happy with whatâ€™s being made, iâ€™m sure you have the skills to do something about it?? I would gladly pay to see that happenâ€¦

By: Aral Balkan

Aral Balkan — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:54:28 +0000

@Tink:

Unfortunately, the current crop of RPC offerings are not very usable. There’s something inherently unusable about Flash Remoting support that changes/breaks with every version of Flash for example and makes people search through Adobe’s website to find and install Remoting classes before they can even work with it. (And, due to the EULA, no one can redistribute these classes in a simpler way — SWX, on the other hand is open and faces no such restrictions.)

Simplicity is a very important feature.

And, most importantly, SWX is native. It’s the native data format for Flash.

(And, the current reference implementation of SWX RPC works the same way on Flash 6, 7, 8 and Flash Lite 2.0 and 2.1)

The fact that the method used to load SWF files in Flash is called loadMovie() doesn’t mean that you can’t make it more descriptive in your own code. In its simplest form:

function loadData(url, encoding)
{
// create a movie clip, etc…
myDataHolder.loadMovie(url, encoding);
}

If you want to work close to the metal, you can use loadMovie() and create your own APIs, etc. Otherwise, SWX AS (the ActionScript library for SWX RPC) gives you a completely abstract interface for doing RPC calls that’s very intuitive and descriptive

SWX RPC is definitely very important for Flash Lite development (as there is no other RPC solution on that platform; Flash Remoting does not work in Flash Lite) but SWX RPC has applications for the web (especially mashups with the provided SWX APIs for Flickr, Twitter, etc.) and beyond (see Folkerts AIR application that uses SWX.)

To learn more about the current state of SWX, please see my recent blog post titled What is SWX, how does it work, and where is it going?.

By: Tink

Tink — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 17:05:54 +0000

Hacking away at something because there isn’t a good alternative is obviously valid, but hacking away when there is a perfectly useable solution available is maybe a bit of a waste of time?

My problem with using things like ‘loadMovie’ to load data is that it is not descriptive. I wouldn’t write a method called ‘moveLeft’ that made something fade out, as if we all went about this none of the code would make sense at all.

That said Aral’s done a great job and SWX is really taking off in the FlashLite community where its really needed.

By: ethan

ethan — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 04:07:22 +0000

Yeah, and if we need further examples: if we look to adobe, microsoft, and apple software i’m sure they are using hacks in their programming languages. Framworks and patterns are there to be used to help us-not create a oppressive religion where any other solution is shouted down. Can someone tell me what the definition of “hacky” is anyway? One man’s hack is another man’s solution….

By: mike

mike — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 02:56:52 +0000

Amen!
The days of beating back the briars in ActionScript with f*cking sticks and pushing our way through seem to have been forgotten. The world of Flash came from creative folk who dared to hack and not listen to the naysayers from the “Enterprise” world. Now those folk are leading the way..
Run, run I say and find your own SWX to hack away at.
Long live __proto__!