Flash/Flex at Google Developer Day
Posted by Ali Mills Thu, 31 May 2007 23:12:00 GMT
Luke and I took the day off from our new job today to head down to Mountain View and attend Google’s Developer Day. Google’s big announcements today have to do with Mapplets, Geoweb searching and Gears.
Today, we learned that SWFs relate to these announcements in the following ways:
- Mapplets were shown with a YouTube video in an info window which had me believing that SWFs were always supported in maps now, but later in the day at the KML Search and Developing Maps Mashups Using KML/GeoRSS session we learned that all Flash content isn’t necessarily supported – maybe just SWFs from certain domains (YouTube and Google video only?). The presenters weren’t sure.
- Kevin Lynch was asked on stage near the end of the keynote to talk about Adobe’s involvement in Google Gears. They’re involved! Apparently Google’s working on it with Adobe, Opera, and Mozilla. Kevin presented an Apollo app working online, syncing with Google Gears, and then working offline from the data pulled from gears. He did a great job. You can watch the keynote here and read more about SWFs and gears on Ryan Stewart’s blog. What’s up with the new wave of browser plugins – first Microsoft with Silverlite and now Google with Gears? Anyway, I was really impressed to see Apollo’s embedded SQLite database demonstrated!
- At the Advanced Topics with the Google Data APIs session we learned that Google intends to add a crossdomain.xml file at some point in the future so that ActionScript developers can hit the GData APIs from the browser Flash Player. Since I asked for a crossdomain.xml file last November, I’m not holding my breath that it’ll happen anytime soon. It is, however, exciting for us to hear that it might someday happen since Luke and I spent four months developing a desktop Google Calendar complete with AS3 HTTP and AS3 GData layers. Now, it looks like our calendar is going to be an Apollo application, and the HTTP and GData layers we wrote will be open-sourced. We spoke with some Google employees about making this happen and will keep our blog readers up-to-date with the progress. Personally, I want Google to host a crossdomain.xml file before I put more work into our GData implementation.
- Finally, I showed my Flash Lite Google Calendar to a couple people down here and there’s still interest. I’ve decided to port it to Flash Lite 2+, release the code, and start an open-source project around it. Stay tuned!
Here's the code:
http://code.google.com/p/goocal/
Rememer, Flash Lite in a projector doesn't need a crossdomain.xml file, BUT that doesn't let Google off the hook; the rest of the interweb runs in a security sandbox.
Hey JesterXL,
Thanks for the pointer to your Google Calendar Lite project. I'll check it out. And hopefully, I can use some of it. Honestly, I've been meaning look into both it and Shuriken for a while, but I haven't messed with mobile in a while. My side projects have all been non-mobile lately, but that's about to change. I'm shifting focus back to the mobile calendar as my side project of choice.
I probably shouldn't get started on the crossdomain.xml topic, but since you brought it up...
Luke and I spent a lot of time last year (4 self-funded fulltime months) working on a calendar to aggregate all types of event feeds from the desktop or the a browser in either an online or offline state from any operating system. Fittingly, we wrote it in Flex/AS3, and right now, we have a working prototype of the calendar that works with GData, iCalendar, and a local data store (SharedObjects).
In order to get to our current prototype stage, we invested quite a bit of time building a couple foundation libraries. To drive the calendar, we built an ActionScript 3 GData layer, and to drive the GData layer, we built an ActionScript 3 HTTP layer. Specifically, we had to build the HTTP layer because neither the HTTPService class nor the URLLoader/URLRequest combination supports being able to set HTTP headers for GET requests, having access to HTTP response headers, or the ability to add custom HTTP methods. Our plan was to open-source these libraries when our calendar shipped. Realizing that the GData library would be useless to anyone building for the browser without Google hosting a crossdomain.xml file, I requested the addition of one last November to the GData list. My request was met with silence. Not a single person responded. Our plan to open-source the libraries has been on hold until we get some feedback from Google that they'll support ActionScript developers.
Today, we didn't get that feedback. We heard that a crossdomain.xml file should be on the way, but there are security concerns and a Google-wide solution is being sought. No one speculated on the timeframe for the crossdomain.xml file to be added. Honesly, a lot of questions were dodged today...
I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, Google effectively doesn't allow ActionScript developers to hit GData. When they do, Luke and I will get back on track to open-source the HTTP and GData layers we wrote.
Ali