Here’s a question. Why do the terms “Adobe” and “fellatio” go so well together?
They really do suck, gargle and swallow. How dare they remove essential functionality from the CS3 release of Flash, such as the rpc package. I was trying to get the AS3 Facebook API to work, then realised it will only compile in Flex Builder, because of the missing classes. There have been some heroic efforts from the developer community to bridge the gap, but that’s beside the point. Without web services or remoting, Flash is, for my purposes, a pretty but useless and expensive toy.
I saw your trackback, I agree it sucks, but you don’t need flex builder for my solution though. If you download my example you’ll see you can use the classes directly within Flash CS3 and that ‘Main.as’ is compiled from Flash CS3!
Download the rpc webservices example from my site, and run example.fla to see fo yourself: http://labs.qi-ideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/flash_rpc_examples.zip
Thanks Sander – ingenious solution!
Hey dude – you can use everything. Flex is part of Flash – the components are directly available – its more a matter of working out how to use things than just moaning because you don’t know how.
That’s nonsense, Sam.
As noted by Senocular, AS3 in Flash and Flex are overlapping sets. The
flashpackage is shared;flis Flash-only; andmxis Flex-only.This is obvious after a cursory glance at the Flash API and the Flex API.
Though I can understand your frustrations as I have felt the same, I think you over looked a few things
1: Remoting is posible in CS3
2: rpc is posible in CS3
It is just that now you have to do everything from scratch, which is fine for me.
The real problem is that there is a inconsistency from Flex to Flash with AS3. That is where the real problems begin. A side from some fancy data management and components in flex you can do more in flash then flex(“Display wise”). Still knowing that the problem with flex is that it uses a different display API and people make public API’s in AS3 and flex. And if that API needs to display something visual in most all cases that API will only work in Flex there after. Even though people know that flash is the best solution for a visual display API people like Yahoo still make their MAP API(“a very visual API”) with Flex only. That makes you wonder WTF?
Thanks for your comment Josh. It is indeed the inconsistency that’s the problem.
As Grant Skinner pointed out back in May 07 (as part of a discussion of Flash vs. Silverlight):
I would like to drop Flash altogether and use Flex – MXML (over the FLA format) fits much better with the rest of my workflow (e.g. svn, because it’s text-based rather than binary, so diffs are meaningful and useful) but the reality is that most of my work starts with a PSD given to me by a designer. It’s simply not worth the hassle to take those visual elements and get them into a Flex project.
So I end up using Flash slightly more than I do Flex, and getting frustrated with the impoverished API – thus the original post.
I wonder why they got so far into a businees when they suck so much.