[Gnash] Writing Gnash-friendly flash applications (was: Gnas building and running succesfull on amd64)

[strk]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2007 at 11:29:56AM +0100, fruity wrote:
> Hi to the list.
> 
> I installed from the latest cvs gnash on a amd64 (dual core) on a debian
> 4.0 for amd64.
> I've been able also to builde the media server. By now on amd64 native I
> can see youtube and most of all the flash application "out there", while
> video.google still not.

Nice to hear about such good experences :)

> As new to flash design, and since my object is not playing youtube, what
> whould you reccomnd to read as first to learn how to write gnash
> applications? I so the action script reference, but I don't know how
> does a flash source looks like :> at all. and another question, are they
> gonna be runnable from the proprietary flash player?

Welcome to flash coding world.

First thing to say is that a flash movie/application source "look" depends
on the tools you use to generate it. You can take a loost at Gnash testsuites
to get a feel of how source of the tools supported by our testsuite looks
like:

        testsuite/misc-ming.all: Uses Ming C library (libming.org)
        testsuite/actionscript.all: Uses Ming's command-line ActionScript 
compiler
        testsuite/misc-swfc.all: Uses swfc, from SWFTools (swftools.org)
        testsuite/misc-swfmill.all: Uses swfmill (swfmill.org)
        testsuite/misc-mtasc.all: Uses MTASC (mtasc.org)

Both Ming, swfc and swfmill are able to generate every (virtually) tag of an 
SWF,
while MTASC can only generate the ActionScript bytecode.
Ming, swfc and MTASC contain an ActionScript compiler while with swfmill you 
have
to use ASM-like syntax. Another asm-only tool is flasm (flasm.sf.net), which we
don't have a testing framework for (yet).
Ming additionally supports asm-like syntax.
Swfc uses Ming action compiler internally.

>From the above information you can see that Ming and swfc are the most 
>complete tools
out there. An additional info is that swfc source code is more compact when it 
comes
to mix up actions and definition tags, but Ming is more complete as of 
supported stuff
(and has many language bindings)

All tools produce SWF which are going to be runnable from the proprietary flash 
player

For a quick start I suggest you try makeswf (Ming's command-line ActionScript 
compiler).
You can start from an input.as file like this:

        trace('hello world');

and compile it with:

        makeswf -o output.swf input.as

As you go on learning, please always try Gnash while your application grows, so 
you'll
catch Gnash bugs earlier. Using trace() is an invaluable tool to debug both 
your application
and the player itself. Ming's makeswf tool supports the C preprocessor, so it 
should be easy
for you to remove any testing code at compile time.
If your testing code outputs FAILED or PASSED as the result of checks then your 
application
would be immediately usable as an automated testcase for Gnash testsuite.

Thanks for your attention.

--strk;