w3blog

I originally posted this on the OSFlash mailinglist, but i thought it would make a good blog post, so here it is. My vision of a next generation web application framework.

I’m happy to finally be able to let the cat out of the bag. Darron Schall and myself have been working on a low level 6502/6510 emulator and, based on that, on a Commodore C64 emulator/simulator.

The emulator is completely written in Actionscript 3 and runs on Flash Player 9. It loads the original binary C64 Kernel ROMs at runtime, and executes them just like the original hardware would do.

Inspired by a user i wrote a proof of concept DENG proxy today, to be used in OpenLaszlo applications.

I just published a new DENG build, that fixes a bug that prevented text from showing up when multiple DENG components were used at the same time:

Demo: http://deng.com.br/mx2004/multi/
Download deng.swf: http://deng.com.br/mx2004/deng.zip
Download sources: http://deng.com.br/deng_1_0_44_src.rar

The Flash Player 8.5 features a nifty API to dynamically load assets at runtime, using the flash.display.Loader and flash.system.ApplicationDomain classes. Let’s assume we have a package, test.c1, that we want to keep in a separate SWF and only load it into the main SWF when needed.

This weekend i continued to play with Flash Player 8.5 alpha, and did something kinda crazy (at least i thought so when i started).. I tried to render high resolution GIS data purely clientside with Flash.

In the beginning, i was just searching for detailed, free, redistributable map data of the world, with political country boundaries, and maybe state boundaries too, to write a simple world map component. I was scanning through a lot of link lists, and almost all material i found was either incomplete, not detailed enough or expensive. Except the “Vector Smart Map Level 0 Library”, a huge (1.8GB), free and redistributable collection of all sorts of high detailed geographic data, published by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA).

If you move your mouse pointer over a hyperlink in an HTML webpage, your
browser typically displays the URL in it’s status bar. In addition, if
the hyperlink has a title attribute set, a tooltip is shown with
a human readable description of the linked resource.

Unfortunately, with rich text used in Flash websites/applications this is
not the case. Your mouse pointer will change to a “hand-cursor”, indicating
you’re hovering a hyperlink, but the status bar will stay empty, and the title
attribute is ignored by Flash, making it impossible for you to find out
where the hyperlink will take you without actually clicking it – a severe
accessibility problem.

With Flash Player 8.5, the behaviour of hyperlinks in rich text controls
hasn’t changed, but luckily Macromedia implemented some nifty API extensions
making it possible to actually find out if the user is hovering a hyperlink
in a HTML enabled TextField.

You heard the news already, Macromedia launched their Labs site today, along with public alphas of Flash Player 8.5, Flex Builder 2 and the Flex Framework 2.

Among the first things i did with those alpha goodies was porting the DENG CSS 3 parser to Actionscript 3.

Macromedia announced the Flash Player 8.5 today, featuring a completely new virtual machine (AVM2), E4X, RegExp, Binary Sockets and W3C DOM Events. Flash Player 8.5 (along with the Flex 2 Framework and Flex Builder 2) will be released as public alpha on October 17th. This marks the beginning of the development of DENG 2.0, a completely refactored DENG version targeted for Flash Player 8.5 and above.

Inspired by a blog post by John Dowdell, who was raising the question if it would be possible to trigger a SVG rendering SWF to do the work in case the user’s browser is not SVG enabled, i sat down last night to figure out if this could be solved using mod_rewrite on the serverside in combination with DENG. It actually is possible, with a few constraints. Check out these SVGs (and make sure you have at least the Flash Player 6 installed and enabled) [...]