SWX: SWF Data Format

April Flash Player update to break AMFPHP, SWX-PHP

aral — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:16:17 +0000

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.

SWX Contest Winners

aral — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 10:05:12 +0000

Well, it's Christmas Eve and we have our winners for the SWX Contest. Before announcing them, I want to thank all of our contestants for submitting entries. We had over 20 entries in total.

Also, a big thank-you to our judges -- Keith Peters, Carlos Ulloa, John Grden, Scott Janousek, Alessandro Pace, Richard Leggett, Jed Hurt, Folkert Hielema, and Wouter Verweirder -- for taking time out of their busy schedules to review and provide such detailed feedback on each of entries.

Finally, many thanks to our sponsors for the prizes: Adobe, Lynda.com, Buraks.com, Friends of ED, and yours truly.

So, without further ado, here are our winners.

In the Web category, there was some fierce competition in the top three but Gal to Gal Walk by R. Jon MacDonald inched its was to first place with Toni's Bauernsuche by Muevo and Moodley in at a close second and Extraordinary Careers by Adam Boyle taking third place. Congratulations, Jon!

We also had some great entries in the APIs category but the clear winner was SWXml by Florian Plag.

SWXml is a generic XML parser for SWX that provides Flash developers with a very easy way to create applications that consume popular XML format (e.g. RSS Feeds, Atom, Media RSS, etc.). SWXml parses an XML file and returns an native ActionScript array.

As one of our judges commented: "I think that the clear winner is SWXml; it's a great idea and it's by far the best documented of all the entries. I'd say that of all the entries, SWXml has the greatest chance of drawing new users to SWX."

The SWX Backpack Service by Mike Stead was a close second in the APIs category and was praised by our judges for its completeness and attention to detail. The SubmitVerisignPayment SWX API by R. Jon MacDonald came in third.

Finally, the winner in our mobile category was another entry by Florian Plag, miniRSS, a mobile RSS reader. Tweeter by Aran Rhee took second place and SWX Blogger by Peter Elst came in third. Congratulations, Florian!

And just to remind everyone what prizes Jon and Florian have won: They will be receiving a copy of Adobe Web Suite Premium, Lynda.com 1 Year Premium Subscription, Nabaztag/tag bunny, iPod Touch, A copy of ActionScript Viewer (ASV) and books from Friends of ED.

(And something tells me Florian is going to be a very happy bunny as he'll be receiving two sets of prizes for winning in two categories!)

I am going to be forwarding the winners details to our sponsors so they can ship out the prizes and will be contacting the winners personally to make arrangements for getting them the Nabaztag/Tag bunnies and iPod touches that I'm contributing.

Congratulations again to our winners and thank you to everyone who took part in the contest.

Happy Holidays!

The Code Zone Mobile Edition by John Hattan

aral — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:23:59 +0000

The Code Zone by John Hattan is the mobile version of John's iniature game-portal site, The Code Zone.

The Code Zone (web edition) is a separate entry in the SWX Contest under the Web category.

Here's what John says about his entry:

My mobile site is one of the chief reasons I went with SWX for the communications layer rather than remoting. Since the games are all compiled for Flash 7 and SWX, getting 'em to run in Flash Lite was basically "free". It was largely a matter of putting together some light Javascript-free PHP that'll intelligently size the games for the screen.

The Code Zone by John Hattan

aral — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:13:00 +0000

The Code Zone by John Hattan is a miniature game-portal of sorts.

Here's what John says about his entry:

The site centers around my Daily Puzzles, which are a set of (currently twelve) puzzle games. The puzzles change once a day, and users can log in to play if they want to rank themselves against other players. After solving a puzzle, you're invited to return the next day to see how well you fared against the rest of the players. You also have the option of emailed high score tables, RSS feeds of scores, and daily posts of your rankings to Twitter.

I use SWX to handle user management, login/logout, submitting scores, trophies (hidden awards for in-game accomplishments) and the "statisticalyzer" app that users can use to view their scores and awards.

Thus-far I've found SWX to be easier, lighter, and more reliable than remoting -- my communications failures have dropped to almost zero. Future plans include SWX-based daily rankings widgets for the various widget-platforms as well as Chumby.

Visit the site.

Photo Gallery Viewer by Julio Rodriguez

aral — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:01:36 +0000

Photo Gallery Viewer by Julio Rodriguez is an online tool for viewing web Photo Galleries from Flickr or Picasa (Web Albums).

The photos are presented in a unified and easy to use interface. Its built using the Flickr API that comes with SWX, and SWXml to incorporate data from the Picasa API.

View the site.

Check out the SWX contest entries!

aral — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 12:49:07 +0000

I've just posted the SWX Contest entries -- check them out!

Extraordinary Careers by Adam Royle

aral — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:56:56 +0000

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:

I needed to get some data into a flash site (http://www.extraordinarycareers.com.au/), so I used a combination of swx and cakephp (using CakeSWXPHP of course).

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.

SWX Wordpress API by Benjamin Wiederkehr

aral — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:56:37 +0000

The SWX Wordpress API by Benjamin Wiederkehr opens up Wordpress to Flash developers. You can get all posts or search for posts by author, category, id, date, or tag. You can also play with comments, authors, categories, tags, images, and options.

Here's what Benjamin says about it:

The idea of creating SWX-Wordpress came when i was strugling with a project at university. We had to create a prototype of some databased driven application . . . I was using a handwritten script to connect to the database and it was such a hassle to get the data that i spend more time on that than on actual designing the visualization.

During summer I experimented a little with SWX and decided to rewrite the above mentioned visualization with the use of SWX. What I need first is a solid library of functions to get the needed data. I took the Wordpress Template Tags as my archetype and thought out a basic set of functions with the data and datastructure they should provide. The result is the actual function catalog.

From here on it was just a matter of programming skills (I had to learn), good coffee and some nightshifts in front of Textmate.

Read the whole story behind the SWX Wordpress API.

SWX Kuler API by Florian Plag

aral — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:56:26 +0000

SWX Kuler API by Florian Plag parses a kuler rss feed (e.g. most popular, highest rated, ...) and returns an array with the color themes.

It's also possible to search for specific themes. The filters use the Kuler search feed. So you can look for title, hex values, etc.

The SWX Kuler API works with both PHP 4 and 5.

Here's what Florian says about it:

I also had some fun with "kulering" the swx logo The Service Explorer and the Data Analyzer are really nice tools. It's really easy to work with SWX!

SWXml by Florian Plag

aral — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:56:16 +0000

SWXml by Florian Palg is a generic XML parser for SWX.

SWXml provides flash developers with a very easy way to create applications using the popular XML format (e.g. RSS Feeds, Atom, Media RSS, etc.).

SWXml parses an XML file and returns an array containing all the information. So you don’t need to write ActionScript Code for parsing, you can just use the data of the XML file in a native way.