Open Source Flash Development

Introducing the World of Open Source Flash

I was eight years old when my father brought home our first computer. It was an 8MHz IBM XT PC compatible with a four-color CGA display, a whopping 640KB of RAM, and a 20MB hard drive. I quickly tired of playing the few games available at the time—Alley Cat, Moonbugs, Dig Dug—and began leafing through […]

Exploring Open Source Flash: What’s Available

In this topic, you will get a brief introduction to some of the open source tools that are available, including both the projects covered in the rest of the topic and some other noteworthy projects worth checking out on your own. We’ll cover three major categories of tools: ■    Development tools ■    Libraries and toolkits […]

Preparing an Open Source Workflow (Open Source Flash Development) Part 1

This topic covers the following: ■    Installing the tools necessary for Flash development ■    Setting those tools up so they best work with each other ■    Creating a simple sample project with those tools ■    Exploring some alternative workflows In previous topics, we described some of the tools available for open source Flash development. It’s […]

Preparing an Open Source Workflow (Open Source Flash Development) Part 2

ActionScript 2 development You’ve already seen how to use FlashDevelop to create ActionScript 3 projects; you can also use FlashDevelop to create ActionScript 2. In the following sections, we will show a different workflow commonly called AMES because it consists of ASDT, Apache, MTASC, Eclipse, and swfmill. Installing MTASC Installing MTASC is a simple matter […]

Preparing an Open Source Workflow (Open Source Flash Development) Part 3

Creating your first ActionScript class To create your first ActionScript class, follow these steps: 1. On the left side of your workspace, you should see an area called the Navigator (see Figure 3-11). Select the src directory by clicking it. Figure 3-11. The Navigator panel from within Eclipse after creating the recipe viewer project 2.    […]

Preparing an Open Source Workflow (Open Source Flash Development) Part 4

Configuring the logger connection If you’ve configured the execute connection, you already have some of the logger connection functionality enabled. You can create a log variable of type XrayLogger in your class: Then you can use the debug(), warn(), and so on, methods to display debug information. The other mechanism of logging requires you to […]

Using an Open Source Workflow (Open Source Flash Development) Part 1

This topic covers the following: ■    Using open source tools to create an application ■    Effectively using graphical assets given to you by a designer ■    Working efficiently with other developers on the same project In the previous topic, you set up the open source tools necessary to create a Flash application. In this topic, […]

Using an Open Source Workflow (Open Source Flash Development) Part 2

Building the application The source code for a simple version of the project is now complete. If you haven’t already, make sure your recipes.xml file is in your FlashDevelop project directory. To build from within FlashDevelop, there are a couple things you need to set up first. First, you need to tell FlashDevelop where to […]

Using an Open Source Workflow (Open Source Flash Development) Part 3

Building the application In the “Creating a Flash application with FlashDevelop” section, you reviewed how to set up your project options to enable building from within FlashDevelop. From the FlashDevelop toolbar, change the pull-down menu on the right from Debug to Release. Now, press F5, or select the Project > Test Movie menu option. This […]

Using an Open Source Workflow (Open Source Flash Development) Part 4

Load the XML file Now that you have a class to hold the details of a recipe, you need to add functionality to load an XML file. While creating this class, let’s explore the ASDT templates feature. First, create a new class named RecipeXMLLoader. Let’s make this class a Singleton so only a single object […]

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