SWX: SWF Data Format

I found last night's SWX Monday very useful as Seb and Ribot uncovered some issues with SWX that just weren't present on my own machine.

Here are a list of notes that I made during the meeting. Consider these an unofficial roadmap for the next point release of Beta 1.2 as I will be looking into them this week.

• SWX MAMP Bundle does not default to the correct start page. The SWX MAMP bundle defaults to http://localhost:8888/MAMP instead of http://localhost:8888/. For the time being the workaround is to set the start page yourself to http://localhost:8888/ using the MAMP control panel -> Preferences -> Apache -> set document root to /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/. Update: This should now be fixed in SWX Beta 1.3. If you still see this behavior, please contact me as I'm finding it very difficult to reproduce this on my system.
• Some Flash examples do not have the class path set in the FLA. The minimal API and full API examples do not have the class path set in the FLA and will not compile until you set the classpath to point to the /flash folder. To do this, go to Flash -> Preferences -> ActionScript -> ActionScript 2.0 Settings... and add the /flash folder (in the MAMP installation, this will be at /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/flash/) to your classpath. This folder contains the org.swxformat package that contains the SWX class used by the minimal API as well as the ExternalAsset and LoadManager classes used by the SWX full API. Update: Fixed in SWX Beta 1.3
• The Flash Lite examples are set to publish for Flash Lite 2.1. Flash 8 doesn't come with this profile installed by default and, in a moment of temporary insanity, Adobe have made the installer for this Windows-only so Mac users with Flash 8 have no way of installing the Flash Lite 2.1 publish profile. Thankfully, the examples also work in Flash Lite 2.0 and the publish profile will be set to that version in future releases. In the meanwhile, set the publish profile to Flash Lite 2.0 yourself if you are using Flash 8. This should not affect you if you are using Flash CS3. Update: Fixed in SWX Beta 1.3.
• The Data Analyzer does not work with mobile SWFs being tested in Device Central. Device Central appears to block LocalConnection requests. This stops you from seeing debug data in the Data Analyzer if you're testing your SWF from Device Central. I will be talking to some friends at Adobe about this so that it gets fixed in future releases of Device Central. In the meanwhile, a workaround is to publish your mobile application for Flash 7 or 8 while testing (remember to comment out fscommands so as not to get errors).
• Flickr.getUserPhotos() failing on PHP 5. The Flickr.getUserPhotos() method fails when run on PHP 5 (the default in the current version of the SWX MAMP Bundle). In the meanwhile, you can use the SWX Public gateway (http://swxformat.org/php/swx.php) as it works from there (test it out using the public SWX Service Explorer) or run it on PHP4. The next release will fix this. Update: Fixed in SWX Beta 1.3.

As previously mentioned, I will be looking into these issues and releasing a new point release sometime this week.

Update: I've fixed the issues above in SWX Beta 1.3 (apart from the Device Central issue, which is something Adobe has to fix.) This latest Beta also introduces better error handling (a fault handler is available for you to use in the SWX Full API and separate fault codes and messages are returned in the fault object.