FlexibleFactory

We’ve been doing quite a lot of stuff using the new FileReference API that allows access to local files without server roundtrips. The current official release candidate seems to limit the allowed file size to somewhere in the region of 512k. This thread on the flash player 10 forums summarises the problem nicely. It’s led us on a bit of mission to find a more recent version of the player, which can be found here:

http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk/branches/3.0.x/in/player/10/

[The contents of this article are now incorrect. We've been using the players in this package and this one for linux now.]

Thankfully, this newer version does not seem to carry this FileReference limitation.

If you look through previous posts on our blog, there are a couple of posts relating to the location of the most recent player. Once again, the most recent version appears in a different location. This rather begs the question as to why new players are being littered around various places on the adobe website with no apparent consistency.

Why aren’t developers being informed of newer releases of the player that can be publicly obtained? Why are they being “hidden” in the various branches of the Flex SVN repository?

Last week, I updated and rebuilt the Flex SDK from Subversion, and was pleasantly surprised to find that new players had been included in the repository. It was followed by disappointment that my pet project, which leans heavily on the new SAMPLE_DATA events in the Sound API stopped working.

It turns out that in player 10,0,0,591, the SAMPLE_DATA event string, which up to this point has been a property of the flash.events.Event class has been moved to now exist upon the flash.events.SampleDataEvent class. I’d always wondered why the Flash Player team had chosen to create a SampleDataEvent class, but to put the string that defines the event on the Event class instead of the SampleDataEvent class. It appears that this inconsistency has now been cleared up.

It does, however, lead to a situation where a software product labelled as Release Candidate is still having significant changes made to it that will break software developed against it. It leaves me with the conundrum of having examples of the new Sound API extensions on our blog that will either work with the latest (but somewhat obscure) version of the player and leave most users with a broken experience, or to develop against the old API in the knowledge that the pieces will eventually break when newer versions of the player are officially rolled out.

I think it’s time to redefine my understanding of the term “Release Candidate”!

[The contents of this article are now incorrect. We've been using the players in this package and this one for linux now.]

The infomation in a previous post about the location of the standalone debug player for Flash Player 10 is now incorrect as Adobe deleted some locations from the Flex subversion repository around the start of the month.

The player 10 debug versions can now be found here:

http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk/trunk/in/player/10

As far as I can tell (I’ve only checked Windows standalone and Windows plugin, not the activex version), they’re at version 10,0,0,591, released yesterday. The browser plugin installed is a debug version, which will be handy.

If (like us at FlexibleFactory) you like living on the bleeding edge then you might want to consider building your own FlexSDK from the source code which is openly available at http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK

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