BrokenBlog

I spent a large portion of yesterday caught up in a bug. Basically, Flash would make a call to Javascript, and a while later, get a call back. It worked something like this:

ExternalInterface.addCallback("callback", function ():void { ... });
ExternalInterface.call("doSomething");

Unfortunately it didn’t work. I thought I did everything right, I set allowScriptAccess to “always”, and since the swf and html page were hosted on different domains, I grant access to the swf via Security.allowDomain. But, whenever Javascript tried to call the “callback” function I would be stuck with this Javascript error:

Error in Actionscript. Use a try/catch block to find error.

So I tried putting it all in a try/catch of course, but that had no effect. Setting ExternalInterface.marshallExceptions to true changed the error message, but was no more helpful. I changed the function, but the error message didn’t go away. I had a hunch Flash itself was throwing the error, and I managed to figure it out.

The callback function itself was located in another swf that was loaded by the swf that set Security.allowDomain. I loaded it in the same ApplicationDomain and SecurityDomain, so for all intents and purposes I thought there were all the same blob of code. That’s not true, at least where ExternalInterface is concerned. Once I set the same Security.allowDomain for both swfs, the error stopped occurring. Flash was throwing a SecurityError the whole time, but I had no way of knowing that was the problem without guessing.

Hope that helps anyone else who encounters this problem.

As a developer, I generally like very fast builds. I only managed to complete my recent port by using fcshctl to keep me from going insane waiting for the results of my work to show up. At my job however, fcshctl alone doesn’t seem good enough (although, not for lack of trying).

A clever coworker reproduced a cool feature of some recent web frameworks to make an autobuilder, a system that will automatically build projects when files related to the project change. But today I wondered if automatic Flash builds weren’t nearly fast enough! Turns out they were not.

Using some command line tools that make use of inotify (a Linux-only, file change notification system) I can have automatic builds that spend literally no time waiting to build when files are updated. Install inotify-tools and try this command:

inotifywait --monitor --recursive -e close_write -e moved_to -e create -e delete <watch folders> | while read line; do echo $line; <build>; done

Replace “<watch folders>” and “<build>” of course with the folders than need watching and the build command, respectively. inotifywait pipes changes to the files or folders you specify into the while loop, which then runs the “<build>” command upon each change. Combined with fcshctl, it creates blindingly fast Flash builds.

On a side note, I’ve been using vim lately.  I’m growing pretty fond of it, but it (and gedit too) create temporary files. You’ll either need to modify the inotify command to ignore these files, make sure they’re not placed in the same location, or disable them entirely as they will send unwarranted signals to inotify and trigger premature builds. This could apply to some version control software as well.

I spotted this game today. Yeah, I got a huge kick out of it.

I’ve always been annoyed by the hatred of Flash by the development world. I’d prefer to see it hated for real reasons (there are plenty) and replaced by genuinely better technologies, but the hatred comes from people who often don’t care to understand Flash and support poor solutions as the answer. Lately this hatred has been getting louder, and from a PR perspective Flash couldn’t be worse off.

I’ve tried to fully describe why this anti-Flash movement is, in so many ways, wasted energy, but I found another post instead. Here’s the best description of what role Flash plays on the Internet that I’ve read since the first Flash ad pissed off a JavaScript developer.

“The World is Moving to HTML 5″ and Other Flights of Fancy by Richard Leggett