Subverting Flash – Diff me again

Working on legacy codebases isn’t a dream job. If your legacy codebase is a weird mix of scripting, media files and classes, chances are you’re a Flasher.

As far as I know, there is no end to end solution for diffing flas. The best tool we’ve got at the moment is a jsfl script at Software Secret weapons:

>> flash DOM to XML

The utility extracts ActionScript (AS) code from an *.fla file and outputs to (not always valid) XML. For all its shortages, this is unambiguously a first step towards a  workable solution for diffing Flash files.

I plan on extending the utility to extract asset attributes as well as AS code. once this is done, rather than relying on an existing diff tool, it could be a good idea to develop a hierarchical diff view. Besides that would give me the ideal excuse to write an XML diff tool and integrate with ee-xml, our budding XML editor

The last step is to integrate with a version control system. SVN via TortoiseSVN will be my pick. The hardest part was digging references from the docs:

>> Tortoise SVN diff tool setup (from the turtle’s mouth)

It’s been suggested that whoever brings a qualified diff tool  to the flash community will attain fame and glory.

I feel lazy.

Javascript text editors: if everything could be that simple…

I had a weird premonition today: If we want to develop exciting, successful web services, we need slightly more than just text boxes using plain text.

If you’ve ever searched for a javascript tree component, you probably noticed that there is a lot for sale and little to use. Not so for text editors.

Well go on, get your favorite search engine and blip ‘open source javascript text editor’

And if you feel you might get your hands dirtier trying a full blown editor than you would building one from scratch, this  looks a good place to start:

Geekpedia: Creating a rich text editor using javascript