Library Type Assets in ActionScript 3.0 :: using assets created with current releases of Flash Authoring

Ali Mills — Tue, 16 May 2006 20:12:00 -0700

In the previous post Library Type Assets in ActionScript 3.0 :: using the [Embed] metatdata tag, I mentioned that an ActionScript 3.0 application can load library type assets (i.e. SWFs) created in current releases of Flash Authoring during run time. This is a big deal – a huge deal – because without this ability there wouldn’t be any way to create a MovieClip and include it in a Flex Builder 2.0 project until Blaze becomes available.

The simplest way to load a legacy SWF is with the Loader class. After it’s loaded, you can manipulate its DisplayObject properties with the Flash 9 Player’s AVM1Movie adapter class.

While this method works well for canned widgets like video and music players that don’t need to communicate with their host application, it doesn’t work well when host communication is a requirement. When this is a requirement, it’s necessary to take advantage of features available through the LocalConnection class, because the only way for ActionScript 3.0 running in the AVM2 to communicate with legacy ActionScript running in the AVM1 is over a LocalConnection .

While researching an elegant solution to the problem of how two pieces of code (AS2 and AS3) running in two separate virtual machines (AVM1 and AVM2) can communicate, I looked to the book Enterprise Integration Patterns : Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions from the signature series of one of my favorite authors Martin Fowler. Chapter 2 of the book explores different integration styles and suggests that the Remote Procedure Invocation approach is a, “mechanism for one application to invoke a function in another application, passing the data that needs to be shared and invoking the function that tells the receiver application how to process the data.” After reading this and the rest of the section (the full Remote Procedure Invocation section can be found online at http://www.awprofessional.com/articles/article.asp?p=169483&seqNum=4), I was convinced that the Remote Procedure Invocation approach would work and designed an AS3 stub and AS2 skeleton class. They follow:

assertTrue: Library Type Assets in ActionScript 3.0 :: using assets created with current releases of Flash Authoring

Library Type Assets in ActionScript 3.0 :: using assets created with current releases of Flash Authoring