SWX at Play

Aral Balkan popped up from Brighton last Wednesday to deliver an enthusiastic presentation of his new take on data exchange for Flash at last month's London Flash Platform User Group (LFPUG) meeting. (No I also don't think the acronym has improved much since it was LMMUG!)

He was obviously taking delight in his new-found passion for simplicity and fun, and dropped in some observations of close friends (by his estimation very good developers) who have been hamstrung by a fixation on doing development 'properly' - so caught up in how to do development properly using patterns, frameworks, and other cleverness that it has impacted on their ability to deliver. This seemed to resonate with the audience (including myself!) and I'd have to agree with Aral's musings that this is partly a result of Flash developers attempting to ape a lot of Java-based, enterprisey work practices and methodologies in an effort to be taken a little more seriously by their developer peers.

Adopting more serious software development methodologies is a positive development in the Flash community, but most of the time we are working on small, throwaway pieces of work that don't require a lot of the overhead and planning of RIA's. Realising this, Aral had a moment of inspiration, and decided that for many Flash applications data exchange should be much simpler than it currently is. This resulted in him decompiling test SWFs to understand the bytecode as part of an effort to get php scripts to return SWF files containing the data a developer might want returned to a client movie. It's a novel, (and very niche!) approach to data exchange in Flash. Instead of the overhead of setting up your remoting connection, and de/serializing data you simply loadMovie, and receive a SWF back with all the data you want ready to use.

SWX format was the result, and he got quite a warm reception in London, but not so much online. It resulted in quite a humorous online spectacle over the next few days. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but after all the commotion that's been caused it's definitely on the todo list :-)