UrlKit 0.70 with various fixes and Flex 3 Support on Google Code

October 9, 2007 on 8:44 pm | In Flex, Programming | 5 Comments

I’ve finally moved UrlKit over to Google Code, in the course of which I applied a number of contributed bug fixes (thanks to Tom Ortega and Cyprian Kowalczyk for their help with IE and Opera). It now lives on its very own UrlKit Google Project Page complete with bug database, wiki, browseable SVN repository, and everything that an open source project ought to have. I also did a bunch of work on build scripts to make it much easier to build, test and cut new distributions.

Apart from these fixes, the other main work that took place in 0.70 was the introduction of support for the new Flex 3 deep linking features provided by BrowserManager. Basically, the Flex 3 framework takes care of all the browser-dependent Javascript history support for UrlKit, which is great because I absolutely hate working on that part of it! In this scenario, UrlKit provides the URL parsing/generation logic on top of the basic, unadorned deep linking support you get with Flex 3.

I ran into a bug with Flex 3, unsurprisingly since it’s in Beta — the BrowserManager interface appears not to work in a key case (although I think it used to). This bug is logged as SDK-12955 if you care about such things — and you should, since you can boost the likelihood of it getting fixed by voting on this bug!

By the way, this is the first time I’ve used Google Code personally, and I must say it’s a breeze. And I feel so much better about the project, knowing that people consuming open source projects expect the kind of features that Google Code and Sourceforge offer as a minimum. I wish it had been around when I first hosted the project (Sourceforge was there, of course, but I’m glad I was lazy, I mean I’m glad I waited.)

5 Comments

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  1. Hi there!

    I am looking for a solution to use deeplinking + BACK-button feature purely with AS3.0 in flex3 (not in flex mxml project, but in flex AS project). If i understand it correctly, UrlKit works with Flex’s BrowserManager and other flex classes, but can i use it in pure AS3.0 project?

    If yes, could You give me some ideas what needs to be done in order to adjust UrlKit for pure AS3.0?

    The best way so far i know of getting deeplinking and BACK-button functionality into AS3 project is SWFAddress, but it has its flaws..

    Best,
    Michal

    Comment by Michal — October 12, 2007 #

  2. The issue is not which browser deep-linking interface UrlKit works with — the issue is the Actionscript side of UrlKit, which provides much more than deep linking. UrlKit is designed to interface cleanly between the navigational state of a Flex application and URL syntax. So the ActionScript part of it is designed specifically for Flex apps, not for pure AS3 projects.

    One possibility is that you can use just the Javascript part of UrlKit (urlkit.js) as a replacement for SWFAddress, if you find the deep-linking aspects of UrlKit more to your liking. Since urlkit.js just communicates with BrowserManager via ExternalInterface, it shouldn’t be hard to make a pure-AS3 version of BrowserManager. In fact, I don’t think BrowserManager.as has any significant dependencies on the Flex framework. But I did not aim to be an alternative to SWFAddress, and I wouldn’t say that the deep linking features of UrlKit are necessarily superior to SWFAddress.

    I do not think there are very many dependencies though, so you may want to investigate ripping out the Flex specific pieces of UrlKit yourself if you want tthe URL ruleset aspects, which to my mind are the more valuable piece.

    Comment by joe — October 12, 2007 #

  3. Thanks Joe,

    Your reply helped, and so did my little investigation into SWFAddress today.

    I’ll stick to SWFAddress for the moment, since i need a quickie solution, but UrlKit’s rulesets seem to be really helpful, and i’ll get back to materializing your suggestion a bit later.

    Thank You
    Michal

    Comment by Michal — October 12, 2007 #

  4. Thanks for the udpated technology. Since there have been upgrades to both SWFObject and URLKit, I haven’t been able to use the two together. Specifically using SWFObject only allows one-way communication from the Flex-App >>> Browser.

    Since both of these technologies are commonly used in the Flex/Flash community, I was wondering if you might post an example of the index-template-html using the two. I have tried both static and dynamically embedding with no success.

    Thanks,
    J

    Comment by jwopitz — December 11, 2007 #

  5. I don’t think there is any problem using SWFObject and URLKit together, actually — we have been doing it for some time with SWFObject 1.4.4. I didn’t write that JS code myself so I don’t have all the details at hand, but I just looked at it and we are calling SWFObject in a fairly ordinary fashion. One possible caveat is that you must pass a unique object ID to SWFObject for the / tag (this ID is the second arg to the SWFObject constructor). Hope this helps — let me know if you’re still stuck and I’ll try and post something.

    Comment by joe — December 11, 2007 #

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