Chakra Media blog

The crew over at Asual just released SWFAddress 1.0 which not only provides one of the cleanest solutions for enabling back button and deep link support, but provides a sweet technique that enables search engine indexing for those deep links.(nice!) I think this is a great milestone for the Flash community as SEO (and back button support) has always been a thorn in the side of Flash web development. Finally, the 'search engine' argument can be put to rest and hopefully people will start using this great tool. Thank you, Maria and Rostislav, for taking the time to do this and release it under open source. Your efforts are greatly appreciated.

I recently launched my first e-commerce rich Internet application (RIA) for a surf video distributor here in Southern California. Koastal Media Distribution, Inc. is an independent distribution and production media company specializing in worldwide representation of the finest surf films available. They wanted a site that would allow people to view high quality video trailers as well as be able to purchase the video if they wanted to. The site was built using Flash 8, PHP, AMFPHP, mySQL and is back-button/deep-link enabled. The shopping cart and check out functionality is all contained within the application.

One of the main challenges with this site was the blending of e-commerce functionality and the streaming video trailers. Under normal circumstances the whole site would be deployed under HTTPS, but this would also encrypt the video which would be a significant (and unnecessary) tax on the server. The Flash Player allows for both secure and non-secure connections to occur within the same page, so since most people coming to the site are there just to view video trailers, the choice was made to deploy under normal HTTP and use secure Flash Remoting connections for all communication containing sensitive information (login, new account, check out, etc.).

This created the problem for those customers who didn't feel comfortable shopping online due to the lack of the secure lock icon in the web browser. So an option was created that (with the click of a button) would save the shopper's cart information to a Shared Object and then reload the site under HTTPS. When the site reloads they are prompted to login again and brought back to the check out screen with all their shopping cart info intact.

I originally started building the application using ARP, but my unfamiliarity with using this pattern-based framework was slowing me down, so I decided to focus on getting it working using the methods I was familiar with. Although towards the end of the project I began to see the benefits of using frameworks as the code I was writing was becoming quite unruly. I am currently building an admin interface to this using ARP and Flash... but I may take this opportunity to get my feet wet with Flex.. and possibly Cairngorm.

The live site can be seen here:

http://www.koastalmedia.com

A couple of weeks ago pixelbreaker released a kick-ass add-on to SWFObject called SWFMacMouseWheel which enables the mousewheel support in Flash for OSX. I was a little bummed on their example code though... so I've created a little example of some scrolling textArea components. It uses a simple hitTest to see if mouse is over the textArea and then increments the vPosition accordingly.

example

swfmousewheeljds

Welcome to my first post! I said to myself I'd start a blog as I begin to cross-over from more design-oriented work to more application development related aspects of Flash. I'm also going to start using Flex and wanted to share any useful tidbits that I come across on my journey. Hopefully this helps others who are looking to transition into the wonderful world of rich Internet applications. Thanks for visiting!