SWX: SWF Data Format

We are working on adding and improving the documentation for SWX 2 (which is currently in Beta 1). Most of this activity is taking place on the SWX project site on Google Code.

Here are links to a couple of the articles on the SWX wiki that will help you get up and running with SWX 2:

• About SWX 2
• Installing SWX
• Getting the latest SVN version
• Using SWX

Wade Arnold has an important post on the upcoming Flash Player update and the security changes that will break AMFPHP. As SWX-PHP uses AMF-PHP as a library, it too will be affected.

Wade's post has a crossdomain.xml file that you can use on your existing sites to make sure that they don't break.

Thanks to R. Jon MacDonald for bringing this to my attention on the SWX mailing list.

Extraordinary Careers is the web site of Laing O'Rourke, a privately-owned development, construction and specialist company based in Australia.

The web site makes use of CakeSWXPHP and uses SWX in a novel manner, as explained by the site's developer, Adam Royle:

The site doesn't access the gateway directly - the swf is generated when the site is published from the admin section, and uploaded to the site with the rest of the site files.

What I initially thought would be a big task - getting all of the data into flash in a way that was fast and easy to work with - was a breeze, all thanks to swx! All of the site data (content, image paths, video paths, etc) is loaded upon startup and is less than 25kb - much less than the json equivalent I also tried!

So swx isn't just great for truly "dynamic" situations - it's even useful for generating static data.