The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development (Paperback)

~ Chris Allen (Author), Wade Arnold (Author), Aral Balkan (Author), Nicolas Cannasse (Author), John Grden (Author), Moses Gunesch (Author), Marc Hughes (Author), R. Jon MacDonald (Author), Andy Zupko (Author)
Key Phrases: property inspector, java application, daemon thread, Flash Player, Flash Platform, Recipe Viewer (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

• Explore the world of open source Flash and discover which tools are available.
• Learn how to identify which tool you need and how to best fit it into your workflow.
• Step-by-step walk-throughs guide you through development with the most popular open source Flash tools.
• Written by the project leads and open source Flash aficionados.

The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development is a practical development guide to creating Flash applications with open source Flash tools and workflows. You will walk away with an understanding of what tools will best suit your current situation, making your development easier and more productive, and with the knowledge of how to install and set up some of the best tools available, including the following:

• Papervision3D: to create 3D in Flash
• Red5: to stream video over the internet
• SWX: to build data-driven mashups and mobile apps
• Fuse: to make ActionScript animation a cinch
• Go: to build your own animation tools in ActionScript 3.0
• haXe: to create Flash files and more
• AMFPHP: to communicate between Flash and php

Open source Flash has been a revolution for Flash and has made a major impact on how people build Flash content. The open source tools available expand on Flash's existing tool set, enabling you to perform such tasks as easily create full 3D in Flash or hook up to an open source video-streaming server. Many of these useful tools are powerful yet lack documentation. this book explains in step-by-step detail how to use the most popular open source Flash tools.

If you want to expand your Flash tool set and explore the open source Flash community, then this book is for you. If you already use some open source Flash tools, then you will find this book a useful documentation resource as well as an eye-opener to the other tools that are available.

Summary of Contents

• Chapter 1 Introducing the World of Open Source Flash
• Chapter 2 Exploring Open Source Flash: What's Available
• Chapter 3 Preparing an Open Source Workflow
• Chapter 4 Using an Open Source Workflow
• Chapter 5 Testing and Debugging
• Chapter 6 Deploying Your Application
• Chapter 7 Using AMFPHP
• Chapter 8 Working with SWX: The Native Data Format for the Flash Platform
• Chapter 9 Using haXe
• Chapter 10 Fuse and GoASAP: Open Source Animation Tools
• Chapter 11 Using Papervision3D
• Chapter 12 Introducing Red5
• Chapter 13 Building Some Red5 Apps

About the Author

Aral Balkan is a Flash Platform veteran and overall Internet junkie. Oh, and in 2008 he\'s producing the world\'s first large-scale online web conference, Singularity. Aral cofounded and coordinates OSFlash.org, authored the pattern- based ActionScript framework Arp, and created the SWX data format, SWX RPC, and SWX PHP. His latest open source project is the GAE SWF Project, providing Flash and Flex developers with knowledge and tools to build Rich Internet Applications on Google App Engine. Aral is a published author and has contributed to several books and magazine articles. Specifically, he is the author of the Adobe Flex 2 QuickStart Guide and Flex 3 QuickStart Guide and has authored six courses on Flash, Flex, ActionScript, and open source development. Aral is a regular speaker at international conferences including Macworld, FlashForward, d.construct, FITC, Wizards of OS, and Adobe MAX.

With more than eight years of experience in working with Flash technology, John Grden is the creator of the Xray debugger, FLEXible (an MXML editor), and the FLASC compiler GUI, and he is a core member and contributor on the Papervision3D project. John also started the Red5 open source server project and is the co-project manager along with Chris Allen. John has also served as the director of Flash Platform for BLITZ and was the senior Flash developer with Zing.com. John currently lives near Houston, Texas, and works as a senior software developer for Infrared5.

With extensive experience developing for the Flash platform and Java, Chris is a leader in the Open Source Flash community. Over the last 8 years he has been a software architect and developer for various companies including Cambridge Technology Partners, Mass General Hospital and Scholastic. Chris is currently president and CEO of Infrared5, a consulting firm built around services for the Open Source Red5 server, and is co-project manager and a Java developer for the Open Source Red5 project.

Patrick is a freelance RIA programmer and lead developer of amfphp. He has worked on projects for Microsoft, Toyota, LG, NEC and the US department of education. He has undertaken a bachelor\'s in math and physics and is enthusiastic about the possibilities of blending Flash and dynamic systems.

Nicolas Cannasse is one of the cofounders of OSFlash.org and the creator of the MTASC compiler. He is also the CTO at Motion-Twin, a French independent game studio making web games in Flash. For the past two years, he has been working on haXe, an open source programming language for the Web, capable of compiling to Flash but also to JavaScript and the server side.

Wade Arnold is the CEO of T8DESIGN, which is a rich media and application firm located in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Wade is responsible for strategic planning and product development as well as for creating an exciting and rewarding corporate environment. Wade has been selected to be a speaker at several national software development and security conferences. He has an active dialogue with Adobe and actively participates in prerelease beta development of Flash, Flex, and AIR, and he is passionately involved in open source Flash/Flex development and aligns T8DESIGN behind these initiatives. Wade is the lead developer of AMFPHP and the open source implementation of Flash Remoting. Wade has a degree in computer science emphasizing intelligent systems and an MBA from the University of Iowa. T8DESIGN works with hundreds of community banks and medium to enterprise customers including Nike, McDonald\'s, John Deere, AT&T, Lindsay Corporation, Best Buy, and the Department of Defense.

Biography to follow

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: friends of ED; 1 edition (July 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430209933
• ISBN-13: 978-1430209935
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #510,667 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars OpenSource Flash Development Book Review, November 21, 2008

By	jbcurtin.com (Maryland USA) - See all my reviews

This book is gold, not only did it answer a lot of my questions about some specific technologies like Red5 and Flash-Develop, but it also gave me a very detailed introduction to AMFPHP. Most of all, a new found respect for Apache Ant.

The book tried to cover so many different topics and so many different aspects of Opensource flash development that it was difficult to jump though the book. A lot of the concepts were basic and meant for a beginner, nevertheless this book will guide you in the ways of creating a open-source development environment more effectively then you would ever be able to discover yourself. Personally I would have liked to see more as3, however they kept it nice and 'open' so that anyone could learn from it.

Overall, this book is getting a 5 because even though some of the content was a little dated.(Like any book) the concepts that it offered were solid. This book was a rare one because I was able to read though it easily. It held my interest the entire time.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars To the Dustbin - first impressions, March 11, 2009

By	Mark Twain (USA) - See all my reviews

Anyone using Macs to develop in flash will be very critical of this book and deservedly so because this book appears to be heavily Windows biased. For instance, chapter 3 is "Preparing an Open Source Workflow", a critical chapter for those of us who want to work in a different IDE than the flash one, the author discusses how to implement an open source workflow for ActionScript 3 with FlashDevelop: "FlashDevelop is Windows only...OS X or Linux... should look at FDT, which is mentioned in the "ActionScript 2 Development" section...it is also capable of creating ActionScript 3 applications."

FDT is a proprietary software that requires a license, either commercial or an open source one if the company grants it. And why is ActionScript 3 for Macs discussed in the ActionScript 2 section? I gently flipped through the rest of book determined not to waste my time on another useless flash book (the world is awash in them). Some Mac users may find the book useful but I didn't bother to go any further when a critical chapter like the third one pretty much insulted every mac - flash developer.

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Book, April 1, 2009

By	Akira Lorrack "Your Daily Dose of Reality" (Bowie, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This is definitely a book all serious Flash developers should read. It is the gateway to professional Flash development. The book is written by a collection of some of the most recognizable personalities in the Open Source Flash community. Learn your options as a Flash developer and break free from standard IDEs and workflows. Get introduced to mant external libraries, frameworks, and development tools.

~ Paul Milbourne
Author, Essential Guide to Flash CS4 with ActionScript
Founder, Baltimore Washington Flash User Group