Flash Experiments:

This is my basic playground for showing off work (that doesn't require a server backend) in Flash (primarily FlashMX).

I've been using Flash since version 3.0 and at that point in time, was impressed with it's ability to create simple interactive content at much higher visual quality versus bandwidth than gif's, jpeg and JavaScript, but at the time with no scripting and no data connection Flash wasn't much good for anything else and for much web work continued (and continues rightfully so) those technologies. Flash4's introduction of more advanced ActionScripting,  and Flash5's XML started to address these problems, making it possible to create dynamic web content targeting a plethora of browsers with consistent visual quality and operation (without the same degree of headaches in javascript/html). However while possible, it still failed to be successful in being used as such for valid reasons.

Flash MX has been the latest entry into this mix, and has finally addressed some of my major concerns about using flash as a client development tool, namely components, and better server communication (via much faster non locking XML and 'Flash Remoting'), as well as the exciting drawing api and video integration. Macromedia has done a great job in developing Flash into a serious tool (with some caveats), but time will tell at how well the market will be at accepting it as something other than a tool to generate multimedia rich but usable content poor intro's and banner ads for corporate use.

My goal is to help shift that perception.

Currently available are:

• Physics Simulation:
  • Gravity and Surface Friction
  • Steering Behaviors
• Data Visualization:
  • Dynamic Hierarchical Pie Chart viewer.
  • A UML diagrammer for flash actionscript.

Some of the applications under development (with screen shots coming eventually) that use Flash MX as a front end, xml middleware and java backends (and thus can't host on tripod) are:

• A multi-user socket based mindmap implementation.
• A front end for X10 home automation.

Flash's Problems:

Coding in Flash using ActionScript is still funky as Actionscript is somewhat of an odd beast, especially coming from Class based languages like Java. While prototyping is a powerful alternate method of implementing OOP. The 'Best Practices' recommended method of writing code personally I find harder to read and the implementation of inheritance somewhat klunky. As such I've added some of my own libraries to help with the day to day coding hassles (which will be linked soon):

• Utility to visually code more like a class based language, while maintaining the prototype memory consumption advantages.
• Random Color generator
• Random XML generator

Some things I'd like to see in the future:

• XPath or XQuery ActionScript engine.
• a table component for SQL result sets.
• a full implementation of HTML rendering inside flash.
• a more class based inheritance.