Update: Be sure the check out my second Flash AIM demo with additional features.
Just tossing some code on my blog isn’t the best way to get people excited about it. People want something tangible, something that they can actually play with. As a result, I worked feverishly over the last couple days to get a decent interface for my AIM classes. As I mentioned last time, this is all written in Actionscript 3 for the preview release of Flash Player 8.5. It will not work in Flash 8 or below. If you don’t want to get the player, here’s a screenshot of the new interface in action:
For those of you ready to take the plunge, you can get it from the downloads section. Due to Flash’s security policies, this swf must be run from your local computer. I’m also warning you that there could be some bugs in there. I tried to find as many as possible, but I don’t doubt that some slipped by me.
[...] AIM http://lab.zeusdesign.net/?p=13 [...]
[...] AIM [...]
Do all flash movies running some sort of socket connection require them to run from a local connection for security reasons?
Although this feature is great, this does seem like a limitation.
Macromedia put some pretty tough restrictions into Flash. It’s unfortunate. A Flash movie can connect anywhere if it’s running from your local machine. If it’s served as part of a website, it can connect to the server it came from, and to servers that specifically allow Flash to connect (servers may have a special permissions file to allow Flash connections). See these DevNet articles for more information about Flash’s security.
Alternatively, you can create a PHP or other server-side script that does all the networking stuff and passes data to the Flash movie via XML. I made it possible for a Flash movie to search google using this idea.
[...] ByteArray to PNGEncoder: http://www.kaourantin.net/2005/10/more-fun-with-image-formats-in-as3.html AIM Socket Connector: http://lab.zeusdesign.net/?p=13 IRC Socket Connector: http://blog.franto.com/go.php?http://blog.je2050.de/?p=35 [...]