SWF XML Meta Language

✎ Published: 2005-04-06 10:30:30

I reconsidered developing Flash Applications without an IDE, focusing on content/code separation using Actionscript 2.0, SVG-SWF conversion, and ming for compile-time objects. This would allow application modifications via command line, especially useful on Linux systems. I'm considering creating a Python application to compile these XML files into ming/sswf files, which seems like an interesting project.

SWF XML Meta Language

		I rethought my Ideas I had concerning developing Flash Applications without the IDE. <br>

I still like that Idea, but it would be quite nice to achieve something along the lines of Content/Code seperation here. Basically developing the code in Actionscript 2.0, creating the Vector-Elements using SVG->SWF Conversion (or SSWF Scripts), and defining compile-time objects in ming. In the end one could compile all these files into an application using MTASC. The interesting part would be that one could glue all these elements using a nice XML Schema. Something along the lines of Glade or XUL, just more enhanced.

Maybe some sort of compiler could even generate the gross of SSWF/SVG/Ming files out of the XML Description.

The more I think about it, the more I like that idea; think about the relationship between XHTML, PHP and Javascript. PHP would be the Ming part, XHTML, the XML part and Javascript the Actionscript part.


There's another advance in using this method: One could fix or change applications on the commandline, without the need to use the Flash IDE. This is especially handy if the Flash Application is deployed on some sort of Linux/BSD system, or if one does use Linux on the Desktop.

It's of course quite useless if your primary flash focus is on Gfx/Effect style stuff, in particular as there're already really good specialised Windows applications which significantly simply the process of creating SWF effect animations.

I guess I'll try to invest some time into the design of such a language and write a small python application which compiles these XML files into a set of ming/as/sswf files. Sounds like a fun project :)


In other news - and while I'm talking about it - here's a nice Actionscript editor which I've been using for some time now in favor of the Flash IDE.

SEPY it's free, works on Windows as well as Mac OS X (and should work under Linux too, as it's all just PyQT/Python as far as I remember), and has some nifty features which ease your development routine.