As quoted by Mike Downey in Wired:

“What we’re trying to do with Flash is create a feature-rich run time that’s consistent across all of the platforms. That’s something that has not been the reality for other web technologies. Browsers have not been consistent — even the Java Virtual Machine is rarely consistent on different platforms. For the past 10 years, we’ve been able to say, ‘Here is a technology and a set of tools that allow you to create content once, then deliver it to a wide variety of platforms and know that it’s going to work consistently.”

As many of you may know Flash’s 10 year anniversary is this month and what a great time to be a Flash Platform Developer it is. I have been using Flash Professional 9 alpha these past few weeks and it is without question the greatest release of Flash to date, thanks to ActionScript 3.0.

There are some really good sites out there celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Flash and if you have time you should definetly check some of them out and review the history of this legendary technology. A good article is the one featured in Wired on August 8th. You can view the video from the Adobe Anniversary party here or learn more about the history of Flash from Adobe by clicking here.

I programmed an API which allows interoperability between AJAX, Flash 8 and Flex 1.5. The FlashAJAXBridge API consists of a few simple ActionScript 2.0 methods which allow you to call javascript methods that target document elements and reset their dataProviders. The API also can invoke calls to an instance of the XMLHTTPRequest object which makes discreet calls to the server for loading external xml documents.

I made a simple example that demonstrates the methods that are available for registering javascript functions which can be invoked in Flash or Flex. A cool little extra that I added is the FlashObject instance is set using attributes from an xml-config document to embed the swf. The config document also specifies which div element to write the FlashObject to.

You can view an example of the API by clicking on the link below:
FlashAJAXBridge.html

Below is a really useful class that I wrote for handling multiple levels of nested objects. For instance, let’s say in Flex 1.5 you have a tree and it’s dataProvider has to be reset dynamically whenever a node is selected so that each node can receive a small soap message that can be converted to native ActionScript Objects rather than having one big soap message sent over the wire for the entire tree - run-on sentence if ever there was one.

This approach is much more efficient. The only way to do this is to have an object container with any level of nested objects as properties of the container and so on. The class below will locate any object in the container regardless of where it resides in the object hierarchy and append additional objects to the specified object, return that object or delete that object.

Click here to download the ObjectParser