Useful Flash engines

Build, steal, buy, or borrow… These would be the four basic ways you can make your applications a reality, pretty much regardless of the language you develop in. Flash and Flex development is no different in this regard.

Building will get you what you want, provided you have the skills to do it, but could take a load of time. Time obviously equals money. Stealing source code is of course unethical and I would never endorse it, for the obvious immediate moral implications. But furthermore, it is simply not a commercial option when developing work for clients due to long term legal issues. Buying code or components is often a great way to rapidly make progress that would otherwise take a long time to build. Borrowing code or the closest parallel I could think of, using open or free libraries, components, frameworks or APIs, is often the smartest thing to do when building an application of scale or one that requires a short timeline to deployment.

There are some great large repositories of code out there today for the Flash developer. I came from the early days of Flash, where sites like Flashkit and Were-here ruled the landscape. The upstarts at the time, Ultrashock and Kirupa also had some great stuff (They still do for that matter). Learning resources, code warehouse and decent communities, the lot of them. Fast forward a few years and the community is much, much larger. Maybe a little more fragmented, too. Blogs and bloggers pretty much run the show. There are few sites here and there that provide a larger launch pad for community, but really, you do have to know where to look to find the gems. OSFlash.org is a great starting place, FlashMagazine and TheFlashBlog serve a lot of great content, too. Those things considered, in order to help you find a few libraries of code you might not necessarily know about or have heard about, I’m making this list. I’m leaving Papervision off the list, because unless you have been living under a rock for the last year and a half, you know about it.

1. SWFObject – If you aren’t publishing your Flash/Flex files using this excellent JS method, you are missing out and so are your users. An easy way to simultaneously detect Flash, embed it, and supply alternate content all at once. You’d be behind the times if you aren’t using it, as Adobe has announced it’s going to be the default publishing method for the CS4 family of products.
2. SWFAddress – Like Flash but hate it’s inability to provide deeplinking and proper back button functionality? Me too. Enter SWFAddress. You can now provide rich bookmarkable experiences and help your search engine friendliness, too. SWFAddress relies on SWFObject to work. If you are using Drupal, too, you may want to check out the SWFAddress module, written by my friends at cascadingstyle.net. With Adobe recently announcing the now search engine friendliness of Flash, deep linking is even more important if you need that kind of visibility. Who doesn’t need that?
3. Gaia – A framework touted for it’s strength and ability in building experience sites quickly and easily via a scaffolding process and a strong event model. It certainly has gotten some uptake recently. I have begun research on this framework and anticipate using it sometime this quarter for some Flash work I have planned. Jesse Warden has a great post or two on it here and here.
4. Casa – Growing somewhat long in the tooth, this AS2 library is somewhat obseleted by the changes brought forth in AS3. However, if you have some AS2 code you need to build or extend, this bit of code is well worth your time investigating.
5. Tweener – Zeh Fernando’s super amazing AS2/AS3 powered animation engine. I have been using this since sometime in 2004. I found it digging around in the somewhat crusty, but still very useful proto.layer51.com site. Virtually every project that needs programmatic animation or tweening that I touch uses this. You gotta be crazy at this point to not be using some sort of a tween engine for your Flash development and this is among the very best of them.
6. AS3 Corelib – Doing some things with Flash just isn’t fun. AS3Corelib does a good job at getting lot of those not so fun things out of the way. Image encoders, encryption, strings, numbers, dates… It’s all here. You won’t regret downloading this one. I use this a lot now on many of my projects.
7. Cairngorm – I have to admit, I nearly left this one off the list as it might not be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s complex. It’s a bit niche. What is it you ask? From the Adobe Labs site: The Cairngorm Microarchitecture is a lightweight yet prescriptive framework for rich Internet application (RIA) development. Confused yet? Thought you might be. If you have an application of significant scale and complexity that needs to be built in Flex using a very structure format… You may need to look into this. We at the Iona Group are just beginning to employ it, and I’m not the one using it, it’s more along the lines of one of our dedicated developers (I tend to fall more in the XD, UI realm). However, I know it’s strong MVC architecture is going to give us significant advantages in the templating portion of the views needed for the app we are currently building (it’s a doozy! more on that later, hopefully).
8. Degrafa – A super cool drawing framework for Flex. This provides an MXML interface for the Flash drawing API. I used it to build my DekafLovers mashup and continue to watch the frameworks development. I know they have some great things planned for this, with dynamic raster fills and a number of other big big things around the corner. For now, even though the framework says it is beta, it definitely ready for primetime. Juan, Ben and the rest of the team are just doing a great job on this.
9. Bytearray’s Projects – Ok, I’m going to cop out and call this one 9 and 10… can you blame me? It’s a biggie and many might not even know it’s out there. This site is chock full of stuff. Generate PDFs from Flash? Check. Lightweight easy to use AS3 components? Check. Super kick ass audio visualizations? You know it! Wiimote components. Not even kidding. A freely published amazing AS3 book (French only at this time, I believe). You got it. Thibault Imbert has certainly made a name for himself building some great stuff. He recently took a full time job with DDB, so hopefully his experiments will continue. Truly amazing stuff.

So, there you go… a few snippets and bits I have found useful in the recent months. What are you using in your projects? I’m definitely on the lookout for new stuff, always!

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