[Twisted-web] generating Canvas.swf without needing Flash

[Donovan Preston]

On Feb 11, 2005, at 5:57 PM, Stefano Debenedetti wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have done some experiments [1] in generating the Canvas.swf file 
> using the excellent and free-of-charge KineticFusion SWF compiler [2] 
> instead of the expensive Flash IDE.

This sounds absolutely wonderful. Thank you for trying this; I never 
would have had time to do so.

> At first I simply used an empty RVML file (KF's XML format for 
> representing SWFs) and tried to include the original canvas.as from 
> SVN trunk but I got some (I guess trivial) compilation errors due to 
> KineticFusion being slightly pickier than Flash on ECMAScript syntax.

If the errors are trivial, I am +100 on someone pointing me at an 
environment where I can try this and see the errors, and a guide on how 
to fix said errors. I would prefer to create ecmascript-compliant code 
as much as possible (both in canvas and livepage, if possible -- don't 
know how much the ecmascript standard actually relates to javascript in 
the wild?)

> So I decompiled the original Canvas.swf, cut and pasted all the 
> ECMAScript code to a new canvas.as and included that one and not only 
> it works like a charm but the resulting SWF is slightly smaller too.

Excellent.

> Maybe this will enable future Nevow releases to ship without the 
> Canvas.fla file, which is then redundant and introduces a dependency 
> on Flash for people willing to grok it.

Yes. I will attempt to get an environment where Canvas.swf can be 
generated without Flash asap; it irritates me that I have to have Flash 
running, which is ugly and a pig, just to press Command-0 every time I 
change the .as file.

Donovan