r o b l o g

I’m always open to new approaches to the flash workflow. The worst aspect of a flash build is the tedious nature of stage layout, page build animation and asset loading. So to speed up a website build, I recently used the Gaia framework to help build a website. The Gaia framework is not only a package of classes to handle page and asset loading, but some rather lovely JSFL files that automate the creation of all the template files of a website. After defining a page structure in an xml file you hit a button and an entire folder structure, class package, fla files and swf’s are created. It is quite remarkable and you can get a ‘white site’ built in a few minutes.

That is the good part. For a first-timer there is then a rather steep learning curve to get the site configured to your requirements and understanding how the framework can be manipulated. I quickly found some rather startling undocumented ‘features’ of the template files that really threw me. First, I found that the fla files had a rather obscure setting: “Automatically declare stage instances” unchecked in the publish settings. This is a setting I have never come across and took a while to discover. Secondly, the preloader was coded in such a way to cancel mouse events bubbling through to the Display Objects below. Again, bazaar and unexpected behavior that takes a while to resolve. In fact the live site has an issue with firefox where the initial entry-point swf loads twice. Gaia has a feedback forum but if you look closer a lot of queries are either left unanswered or are grossly lacking in detail.

So all these unexpected quirks probably took longer to debug than it would have taken to create my own navigation and page load model. In conclusion I might use it for some extremely quick-and-dirty builds but not for more comprehensive site builds. I’m quite happy with my own flavor of MVC which I have been refining.