Flash and Javascript, sitting in a tree... 7
We’re looking for somebody who can make Flash 8 and javascript play well together on IE 6/7, Firefox and Safari. If you fit the bill, please drop me a line at pdcawley@bofh.org.uk with a pointer or two to examples of your skills and you, me and my boss will have a nice little talk.
We need a flash application which can be controlled via Javascript – we really don’t want to go sticking 10-15 tiny flash buttons on every page if we can help it, just so they can tell the main app (sitting in another window) that the user did something. We have an application that works with Flash 8 and above, but it only works reliably in Firefox. It breaks more or less horribly in IE 6 and 7 and is a wee bit flaky under Safari 2. I haven’t a clue how well it plays with Opera.
Now, on a personal site, I’d be reasonably happy to live with Firefox only and maybe Safari 2, but this isn’t a personal site, so that’s out of the window.
So, if you think you fit the bill, or you want to know a bit more about the problem, please drop me a line. Save me from having to learn ActionScript as well, when I barely know Javascript yet.
What irks me to ask after reading this is: Why use Flash? I haven’t seen this application, nor do you describe it in any way, but if it’s possible to extract parts from the binary Flash blob and re-create them with Ajax and SVG, then that would be the most interoperable, gracefully degradable and accessible route to go.
Yes, you’re absolutely right. When AJAX and SVG can do everything that Flash can do on as many browsers, I’ll be only too glad to use them.
Credit me with the sense to know that the application we have in mind (which I’m not at liberty to talk about here in anything but the vaguest terms) does need features that we can only get from Flash.
The legacy way that has the widest browser support is fscommand, and you shouldn’t even need a specialist – it’s actually not that painful. Drop me a line if you need and I can shoot you a more detailed answer, but google and the macromedia online docs (unless adobe killed them all) knows it all anyways.
Actually I don’t recall off the top of my head, but you may not even need to the fscommand for the other way, it may “just work.” How are you trying now?
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/flashjavascript/
Ya, I thought I remembered the newer way. Sorry for the serial posts, but here is the slicker way to do it in Flash 8 forward: http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?page=3&;cid=0922A
fwiw, I feel your pain. I worked on a project kinda similar and Flash can be a total pain. We used the Flash/JS bridge, I don’t think that’s even the dominant approach any more, but it wasn’t that bad. The real pain was getting Flash to work period. The Flash docs were inaccurate, the APIs were incomplete, nothing quite worked as you’d expect. And this was just on Firefox. You get cool features with Flash, but they come at a price.