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Flash For The Rest Of Us
antiher0 writes "The first beta of Perl::Flash is done! You can now use Perl to generate flash animations, etc. I've been waiting for something like this to come along :) BTW, be sure to check out the demo page. You can also check out the project breakdown here."
The article wouldn't be complete without mention of openswf.org. This is where Perl::Flash gets it's backend from. There are also a number of useful Flash tools here as well.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Perl has always been good on supporting and integrating with oncoming web technologies. Since i work with both flash 5 and perl, I can say that this is a happy day for me personally, and a happy day for all grahpical inclined web producers everywhere.
better question, now that this is out, does this mean we might see some sort of GPL attached to the flash/shockwave players? IMHO that has been holding back alot of Linux users from being able to experience a great number of excellent looking and functional sites, since they are only capabale of using a beta (and god-awful buggy) player.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
OK, let's take this one sentence at a time...
:-)
Great, just what we need: another overblown client with its own "full OOP language, XML, and socket connections".
Another? No, please do share, I'd be interested to see the others. I think you'll find that Flash was the original and is still the only one with a reasonable user base. If you had read the documentation off of that page, you would have noticed statements in his project report (it appears to be a final year project at Imperial), like "a recent study showed that over x% of browsers have flash players installed" and "there is even a flash player written in java", etc. Show me the other languages, please do.
Another set of security holes in the client.
Now this I am interested in. If you have some exploit code, please feel free to let BUGTRAQ know. If you only have an inkling of an idea, get over to VULN-DEV. Don't assume that because you don't understand something it must inherently be unsecure.
Another reason to buy nothing but Microsoft and Apple because that's the only place Macromedia will bother to support this stuff fully.
As others have pointed out, what this module actually does is allow for the creation of SWF files which Flash merely "plays". SWF has been opened up by Macromedia for some time now, there are players available for a variety of platforms, and you're now evidently justr trying to troll.
More duplication of functionality and code bloat.
Yeah, I've heard about these crazy kids who are trying to duplicate the Unix functionality of OSes like Solaris and HP-UX into this thing for PCs called "Linux" or something. Those crazy kids, eh? Hasn't anybody told them how brain dead it is to duplicate like that...
More content that's entertaining and distracting rather than informative.
I bet that if you live in the US you only ever watch PBS and if you live in the UK you only ever watch Panorama. I used to agree that Flash stuff just cluttered the page and was slow and ugly. Now that people have got the hang of making functional flash and have started to grasp design concepts to ensure information is presented in the best manner, I'm quite happy about it. Oh, and the fact that either in the last 2 years they've made the files smaller, or I haven't really noticed that I've gone from 28.8 modem to 2Mbps DSL.
And all defined at the convenience of a single vendor who wants to use their market position to do an end-run around open standards.
I'll say this again - Macromedia have opened up SWF to the world. It might not be truly open, but it is in the Sun/Solaris 8 sense of the word "open", but perhaps even more so. Cynical bastard.
And another chance for people like you to sell lots of books and training on repackaged old technology.
Yeah, because the huge amounts of documentation and sample code out there for this project and others like it really does suck, eh? I bet you think that Linus get a check from O'Reilly every year for several million dollars with a note saying "thanks for getting interest back in this old crock of shit Unix again!" don't you?
Sorry, I am most unimpressed.
That much was obvious. What wasn't obvious is as to why you are so unimpressed when your arguments against Flash are unfounded in the real world.
Macromedia has a legal right to do this sort of thing, but for users, it's a good idea to turn this sort of thing off and complain to any web master whose site it is an important component of.
Using your arguments, I could turn around and say "Television is bad! Turn it off and complain to the manufacturers!" or "NASA? Are you MAD?!?! What a huge waste of money! Why on earth should we care about our Universe? Stop all that messing around and let's all go back to throwing rocks at each other, because that's what *I'm* comfortable with!"
Never mind... some people just never see it...
If you are planning on constructing a Flash site, please DON'T.
Call me old-fashioned, but even with my cable modem I have no patience for goofy animations to download. It slows things down and contributes to Web Bloat.
I've never seen a Flash site that wasn't an abomination. I prefer web sites that are text and static images. Give me the ability to download animations -- don't attack me with them.
I know my crusade is a futile one. I work in the web biz, enterprise level software, and it's sick how many of our clients insist on larding up their sites with useless crap. Especially when you consider how few people have fast connections. The analog modem is still the way of the world...
Thanks,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
SMIL would probably be a more appropriate replacement for Flash. It's also XML-based, and SMIL 1.0 has been a W3C recommendation for over two years.
Squeak Smalltalk also has the ability to work with Flash. You can even play flash animations within the Smalltalk environment. See link below.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
"Rather than express your content in the Web's native, open, standardized formats, you've hidden you content inside of a non-native, non-indexable, non-searchable format that a good many surfers can't view."
.jpg is indexable? Well you can index the alt tag...so then a web designer would make sure the text from his/her flash movie would be included in a html tag in the page that brings it up. In fact I've used Flash 4 a bit and when you hit publish the .htm file it outputs does exactly that.
And your average
"Forcing them to download the most-recent Flash plugin just for the privelige of viewing your site is presumptious and unrealistic -- many people will just surf to another site, perhaps one of your competitors."
When designing a site you have to assume that the average hit is gonna come from a newer, faster machine. You can't expect the site designer to continue and continue to make site backwards compatible. I know i wouldn't be trying to get a site to look as good in Netscape 1.0 as it does in IE 5. When I design a page I assume that my average visitor is running win98 which happens to include a flash plugin in the install. I figure I'll also get a decent amount of requests from a Win 95 machine and Linux machines. Most of these though would have probably already downloaded the plugin to view other sites in the past but just in case I'll provide a convienient link to tell them where to get it. It is not designers problem if a user can't keep up with technology, he has to go with the majority. As long as the technology is excepted as the norm (which flash seems to be) go ahead and use it.
"Most companies would kill for a few percentage points of market share. But, by using Flash for a client's web site, you'll exclude people with older browsers and unsupported platforms from using your site. These people represent a sizable market share. Do you think your clients don't want these people as customers? Content hidden inside of Flash can't be indexed by search engines. Do you think that you clients don't want people to find their products and services easily?"
See the above solution for the search engine problem. Plus you can't make every user happy it don't happen. And if your service is technology related such as and ISP or Software company, you see customer with out of date equipment as a big Support Hassle.
"I can't think of one instance of where Flash has made a site better. Just about every use I've seen has been gratuitous. People don't surf the web because they want a Rich Immersive Experience."
Image is everything. It's not how great your product is it's how well you can market, display, and how cute it is. Everybody judges a book by it's cover whether they admit it or not. You also forget sites out there that get tremendous amounts of hits for there flash cartoons or games or what not. Heck with out flash we could have that great Napster Bad movie that made me laugh my ass off. There are other good uses to, I generally dislike the intro's but the other stuff it can do is pretty cool.
Just my thoughts,
-Al-
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
For those who want to find out more about this, see the SWF info on PHP's site, or grab a copy of libswf (aka Flash Synthisesizer.)
-Waldo
First, Let me tell you who I am. I'm the owner/runner of 2shortplanks.com. This summer I gave the talk on Perl and Flash at YAPC::Europe. I've read and used the code.
;-) Good job we got that unlimmited bandwidth option from mailbox.
;-)
;-)
Secondly, to all those people trying to see the demos. The machine load is currently at 30 - you may have to wait a bit
Thirdly, Simon (the authour of this code) is on holiday, snowboarding - So he can't speak to you lot, but I'll have a go at talking about where we were in the project before he left.
Simon did this code for his final year project based on an idea that I came up with but I was too lame to implement. Up to this point we are at a stage where we can sucessfully break apart a Flash movie with pure perl, and hold it as a data structure of vector graphics objects (well as SWF tags such as Rect, Shape, Text) that can be altered by access via attributes.
This has been a hard struggle for many reasons. Macromedia's open spec (which is linked elsewhere in this discussion) has many bugs in it that Simon had to work around. The other main difficulty is that Flash is a bit based file format, rather than a byte based format - read the spec and you'll see what I mean. (In other words you have 'tags' that take up less than a whole byte so you have to parse very slowly...) Simon had to write File::Binary (on CPAN) before he could start.
Simon has half done the creating perl code bit in pure perl. At this point the code is written, but isn't debugged. I don't think Simon or I am going to even attempt to do this as we've reached the point where it's logical to throw the code away and start from fresh (look mom, the evolutionary design model!) There's lots of changes we'd like to make - processing unparsed data - moving away from Class::Struct - rewriting the File::Binary to work better - template toolkit scripting ability.
One of the really cool things that Simon has done is wrap a binary library to spit out simple flash files. Unfortunatly this module is free as in beer, not as in speech (read: we don't have the C source code.) It has bugs that we can't fix, but this works in most cases - I prepared the slides for my talk at YAPC::Europe with it, as well as the demos that you, well, will be able to see the slashdot effect dies down.
Simon has been doing all this work in his spare time of late - which is very demanding. Sure, if someone was to offer him to work on it fulltime (*hint*) then a lot more could be done. At this time I'd like to thank Simon for all the hard work, often largely thankless, that he's done on this and other projects (YAPC::Europe, Acmemail, and countless help on other modules)
Now for a little news on the server itself. It wasn't ready to be slashdotted. The load is at 30 for goodness sake! Hooray for Linux not falling over! The code wasn't set up to be put under any kind of load - it's just beta code for discussion that has *no* respect for what it's running on. It should be running under mod-perl. It's not. It should not be using file-based temporary files. It is. It's a work in progress, what do you expect?
In closing I'd just like to say it's a shame that we haven't had a chance to get this into some kind of workable form before the whole world decided to have a look and judge it. The site was thrown up in a rush (arn't they always) for discussion on the list. It would have been set up a lot better if we'd known the traffic we were about to get) and we'd love to have shown you a lot more.
Are you slashdot editors willing to let us have another go on the slashdot rollercoaster ride of server death in three months when we've got everything up to scratch? Go on, I dares you
Hope that's been informative.
If you need any info on this then feel free to email me on mark@twoshortplanks.com and I'll be more than willing to talk over any issues. Though I'm in the UK and it's 12:30 in the morning on a Friday night atm, so don't expect a prompt reply!
Later.
Mark.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
The idea is that Flash is a really interesting technology -- vector graphics, lighweight complex animations, yadda yadda yadda -- but you need proprietary tools to work with it, and the integration with the web browsers is spotty at best -- e.g. they aren't searchable, they don't really support all the standard features like the back button, etc.
That's where Perl::Flash comes in. First & foremost, it's an authoring tool for generating (either one-at-a-time or dynamically-on-the-fly) Flash animations, but I would suspect that it can also be used -- perhaps in Mozilla? -- for other types of manipulation of the Flash file. Cool stuff.
I've just learned that this hasn't been officially released yet -- Simon's on vacation -- so those of you that can get to the twoshortplanks site are seeing experimental code that wasn't yet meant for public review like this. Keep that in mind as you review this stuff -- beta isn't even nearly the word for the code here, so don't be hard on Simon and don't be cruel in pointing out flaws in the code or the ideas: everything is a work in progress at this point.
Whoever this 'antiher0' person is, s|he has revealed this project perhaps a bit too soon....
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
--
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
First, I want to make it clear that I have nothing against the fine hackerly work that is Perl::Flash.
But Flash, itself, is just plain evil. Don't use Flash. Ever.
Why?
So, just in case you didn't get the point: Don't use Flash!
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
First of all a large majority of the people here talking about Flash really don't have any clue what they are talking about. I am currently working on a number of Flash 5 related books, and let me tell you, there is a HELL of a lot more to Flash than most people know... full OOP language, XML, socket connections... the list goes on.
This perl lib is nice and all, but its based on the same library that the basic PHP library is, and really isn't that big of a deal... it outputs Flash 3 files!
If you want cutting edge open source tech for Flash go check out Ming
Ming is a library for PHP, Python and Ruby that really kicks some serious ass!
As for Macromedia Generator, its still by far the leader in this area as it does more than output Flash... it also spits out JPG, GIF, QT, PNG, and Mac/PC exe's. It's more than a dynamic Flash solution, it is a dynamic graphics solution. Think PHP for images. It also has a very powerful plugin architecture based on Java.
Also, I run a mailing list for people who program inside of Flash 5: FlashCoders
A|Q|U|A
- Read Macromedia's own Top 10 Usability Tips for Flash Web Sites to quickly learn how to make your Flash site at least ten times better than the average Flash website.
- Read WebWord's Flash Usability Challenge , co-sponsored by myself, in which a ransom is offered to find a Flash site that is suitable enough for e-commerce to actually make money.
- Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column Flash: 99% Bad for an expert opinion on how Flash makes websites unusable for the average user.
Finally, whatever you do, remember there's a reason why words and characters are so rarely "animated" in the real world. And please don't forget the "Skip Intro" button.--
PERL is practically evolving into an operating system in itself, supporting ::Telnet, ::Ping, and loads of other file-and-network functions available through CPAN. It only seems natural that .SWF is moving into PERL, considering the growing support its obtaining in other platforms. (I just which the sounds-syncing features in the Linux driver I use would sync correctly in the Mondo Mini-shows I catch each week. Instead, they play like chipmunks on speed.)
Perhaps a standard for the platform will come about, similar to PC2001 specs. The current generation of Palms would likely not make the cut, but the next likely would.
Seven Comments, and this site is already Slashdotted to the point of non-functionality. While this code is in beta, it brings about the point of server overhead.
Is this going to be like any of the various servlet engine that can bring a good, hard server to its knees? Is it going to eat all my RAM and CPU cycles like a pothead at TacoBell?
This *looks* like a damn neat thingy, but I'm scared to run it now.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Now thousands of PERL users can program Flash to generate completely useless splash pages.
Dammit. Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
http://www.php.net/manual/ref.swf.php.
also check out swift-generator - also perl based. Quite possibly the coolest .swf based tool of all.
- daniel
- daniel
Turn off your computer and go outside
Flash is a binary coded, obfuscated, proprietary format owned and controlled by Macromedia. It's difficult to program for, supported only on select platforms, only with non-free plugins and utilities etc.
Use SVG, an open standard which aims for wide support, based on XML with a very strong underlying rendering model. It rocks.
\end{rant}quick, delete the post.
Taco's gonna see this, well actually just the word PERL and we are all done.
No more "Standards are important for the web" Articles, just rotating logos all over slashdot. And an fscking intro, NOOOOOOO
Oh the humanity.
Well, it's probably to late allready.
"Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" -- Groucho Marx