http://www.giantfilms.co.za

AS3

I have just completed development on this film companies online presence. This is a AS3 project that previews the companies movies and commerials by pushing out FLVs. It is driven by a customised CMS system.

We completed our online presence a couple of months ago. Its been a team effort, developer wise with me creating the client gallery and Shaun (our talented new developer) putting the rest of the site together. Not too much to say about the development apart from that it is XML driven and uses the Flash 8 contrast/brightness filters to tween between jpgs.
http://www.hellocomputer.net

More of Shaun’s work:
http://www.boyblack.co.za
http://www.pijin.net

Getting Flash and Webservers to communicate can be like trying to send smoke signals in a hurricaine. Dramatic, yes. But it can be a fustrating exercise. Flash Remoting, Webservices, Flashvars, loading assets all of these ask something of a server. You know what youve asked for but sometimes a response aint happening, so you sit there not knowing whats going on.

The guys i work with have introduced me to a great program called Charles:

Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).

Im coming to the end of a project which needed Flash to communicate with a java based CMS system, in which i would send requests via LoadVars and the CMS would respond in XML or errors in HTML or nothing all. But during development [in the IDE!] i could see every variable i sent and every response the server sent. Thanks to Charles.

When developing Flash application that make use of the network capabilities of Flash it is difficult to debug as you cannot see the requests and responses. Charles negates this difficulty by making every HTTP request and response easily visible.

This software is the business, i can not recommend it enough. I have a project coming up next week which will use webservices. I cant wait!

http://www.xk72.com/charles/

I found this great Firefox plugin that allows you to view your swf>trace(‘hello’) results, live in your browser, as apposed to ctl-enter in your IDE.

This should add a lot to debugging, which is nice. It needs the debug player installed which i suppose all good developers should have installed?

Its-> maker: http://www.sephiroth.it/
Its->self: https://addons.mozilla.org/