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The concept is called templating and used to be called 'Server Side Includes' (somewhere around 1997 or so ... ). ASP, JSP and PHP are originally SSI languages / templating languages.
And if you want to use templating for your web developement - which is discussion worthy in itself - anything other that TAL (Pe(rl)-TAL, PHP-TAL or 'original' TAL is completely pointless, because the above mentioned languages are nothing but templating solutions in themselves. There is no point bolting another layer of that on top of them. Which is why I strongly dislike Smarty and it's ilk.

Oh, and I highly doubt that ASP has anything as neat and usefull as TAL. Do check out the OSS solutions, they're regarded as technology leaders in the field for a reason, which is one reason ASP & Co. are treated with suspicion.

Ok guys, I hate the myminicity-com guy too. This is made by a french company called Motion Twin. You can email them at contact@motion-twin.com . This idiots myminicity is called fohootville. Diluge this address, maybe even their http://support.motion-twin.com/ website. With requests that this asshole be tarred/featered, burned at the stake, shot X number of times, where X is the number of posts he's made. And to request the cancellation of his account. I'll probably be trying to troll this message under each of his posts sorry for that :(

Ok guys, I hate the myminicity-com guy too. This is made by a french company called Motion Twin. You can email them at contact@motion-twin.com . This idiots myminicity is called fohootville. Diluge this address, maybe even their http://support.motion-twin.com/ website. With requests that this asshole be tarred/featered, burned at the stake, shot X number of times, where X is the number of posts he's made. And to request the cancellation of his account. I'll probably be trying to troll this message under each of his posts sorry for that :(

Ok guys, I hate the myminicity-com guy too. This is made by a french company called Motion Twin. You can email them at contact@motion-twin.com . This idiots myminicity is called fohootville. Diluge this address, maybe even their http://support.motion-twin.com/ website. With requests that this asshole be tarred/featered, burned at the stake, shot X number of times, where X is the number of posts he's made. And to request the cancellation of his account. I'll probably be trying to troll this message under each of his posts sorry for that :(

The SWF format is actually an open format. You have to submit some personal information, but it's all there for the public to see. The only thing they do do is keep it about 6 months to a year behind the latest version of flash. You can only get the 7 spec right now. However Adobe does have full control of the direction of Flash and unfortunately that has many drawbacks as there are features that could be added and just have been overlooked for one reason or another. If you'd like to check out the spec you can go here: http://www.macromedia.com/licensing/developer/ Also if you'd like a solid action script compiler, but don't what the bloatware that Adobe releases check this out, it will compile Flash 8 too and gives a decent explanation how they do it. http://tech.motion-twin.com/mtasc.html

Of course PHP is somewhat quirky. We all know that. I'd also rather do all my stuff with Python, Zope and Django. But it happens to be that everything is run in PHP nowadays and lots of clients want PHP modifications or an extension to one of the 10 million PHP/MySQL CMSes out there.

Luckily there are neat tools that make professional PHP project work very easy and fun:

PHPTAL (http://phptal.motion-twin.com/) is a PHP based redoo of Zopes TAL (Template Attribute Language) - the best Templating concept ever. Makes Prado look even more sucky than it is allready.

CakePHP (www.cakephp.org/) - the PHP addition to the MVC Framework hype that Ruby on Rails kicked off. Just the right thing for larger Projects that cry for clean frameworks. Very neat.

To be honest, I wound up being dissapointed because I thought that GPLFlash might be an open-source Flash authoring tool.

As far as I can tell, no such tool exists (please correct me if I'm wrong). All I found was MTASC, which is just an actionscript compiler (no gui).

So, both in terms of impact (who is affected, who would use) and interest (pool of people who'd volunteer), it seems to me that an open source replacement to Flash MX ($200 upgrade / $700 full price, OSX and WinXP only, sure to go up in price thansks to the adobe buyout) is a much better time investment to the player (Free-as-in-beer, which runs on Mac, PC, Sun, Irix, and several Linux distros).

Nevermind the terminal game of catch-up that will be played: GPLFlash will *always* be behind the curve to Macromedia. Obviously the same is true for the authoring tools, but your Flash 5 content will still run on your latest-greatest Flash Player -- the reverse is not true.

Is it the fear of being sued? Is it much harder to create an author tool than a player (consider implementing all of the video/audio/video codecs that you'll need to implement on the player side vs. a GUI that outputs .swf on the authoring tool)?

Why replace the free, widely available player and not the expensive-as-hell, mac or pc only authoring tool? I don't get it.

MTASC is an open source ActionScript 2 compiler. of course it's not an IDE, but you can use, say, Eclipse with it.

on the development side, there's MTASC, an open source ActionScript 2 (typing, classes...) compiler. lot's of programs can export swfs for graphics to go with the code you write with it.