Gaia framework
Recently, I came back to my old skill set, actionscript (my first title at Syrup was Flash Developer). I thought I was gonna build an application for people to vote on their favorite photos in Flash, but it turned out to be a HTML development eventually. I had been hearing about Gaia for a while and several of my friends mentioned this framework, and since the project’’s structure is kind of simple, I decided to try it out. Thanks to Vineet, my former superviser, who introduced Ruby on Rails to me two years ago, which contains a very powerful feature for rapid development–scaffolding. To my understanding, scaffolding structures low level construction jobs. In RoR, it takes care of basic data creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting, a.k.a CRUD in seconds. On the RoR site, they have a lot of amazing tutorials, including the very famous “Creating a weblog in 15 minutes“. So when I found out Gaia built their version of scaffolding, I was super excited and decided to give it a try. The setup is pretty simple: download it, install it, open the panel in Adobe Flash, and you are almost there. By clicking a button and selecting a folder, Gaia framework is ready. After that, you need to write a site.xml file in Gaia’’s format. You set up the site structure like a tree view composed by two major elements, page and asset. Then, the most exciting part, you click the ‘’scaffold” button on Gaia panel inside Flash, and boom!! You”ve got a website with navigation, transition, preloading, deeplink, and maybe optional SEO HTML pages all ready to go.
You don”t have to read too much documentation, and API is not too complicated. Also, the framework is in pure AS3, and saves in AS file, so you can read them, and maybe hack into them if you want. One of the features of this framework that could bring lots of flexibility is Events and Hijacking. With this, developers can control and halt every transitional procedure.
Another thing I think might be helpful about is it makes one fla file per page, which could make web development more efficient. By separating pages into different fla files, multiple developers can work on their own page under the same website without interfering with others.\r\n\r\nThere is one small pitfall: I think its code is not 100% perfect, because at some point I had to turn the as3 strict mode off in flash to make it compile. I don”t know where it went wrong, and I don”t wanna fix it either. But it’’s ok, it works totally fine with strict mode turned off.
I also notice their forum seems active, so users can probably find some answers quickly there if they have trouble. This framework tried a very different approach compared to other AS3 libs, but it really hit upon what basic infrastructure works flash development commonly needs. This could lead in a new direction for future flash development.