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PHPLiveDesktop Application in Flash |
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Written by Brett Brewer
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Friday, 27 October 2006 |
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I've been using PHPLive to monitor a web site and offer live chat for over a year now and I'm pretty happy with the basic system itself, but the Desktop application has left much to be desired. I've waited and waited with baited breath for some kind of improvement that would bring it into line with some of the more expensive alternatives such as LivePerson. I was sort of expecting some kind of AJAX solution from them by this point since they seem determined to just use an embedded explorer window to repurpose their existing online interface into a desktop application, but since nothing has materialized, I've been forced to start working on my own version in Flash 8 actionscript 2.
I know, I'm supposed to be cool and do it with Flex/Actionscript 9 (or better yet, Apollo), but I've just barely figured out the existing v2 component "architecture" and I'm just not ready to wrestle a whole new set of bugs and syntax changes just yet, especially since in my opinion they still haven't finished the actionscript 2 docs. And, even more annoyingly, there still seems to be some major issues with Flash garbage collection and memory allocation with regards to dynamic movieclips that use onClipEvent or looped frame actons to simulate logarhythmic motion, which I just happen to be doing in my UI. Anyway, I'm slowly plugging away on the program and am about ready to implement the basic chat features now that some of the interface code is done. It's quite a chore to write something with AMF/PHP on the server side and Flash on the client side. It really makes me wish I'd used this as an excuse to learn more AJAX or some Python. I could probably have learned something new from scratch and implemented this program faster than I'm doing it in Flash with over 8 years of experience living in that vague inbetween that is the world of "Flash Development". It's not programming, it's not graphic design, it's "multimedia development", it's "web application design", it's random technical and artistic shit looking for a reason to exist. I've learned so much random technical and artistic stuff in the past 15 years, I could have stayed in school and gotten a medical degree and probably have used less of my brain on more interesting things AND had the side benefit of a bigger paycheck. But I digress. The Alternative PHPLive Desktop Application I'm working on will have some features I think are sorely missing from the official version. Most importantly, the traffic monitor display will not refresh and lose your place every time someone enters or leaves your site. Also, there will be nice little icons to show which search engines a user came from and their search keywords if you hover over it. It will have the same tray icon functionality and will emulate all the existing features of the official verison, but in a nicer, more useful way. I have no idea if it will be something that can be released to the public or sold, but this is the place where you will find out. At the moment, it's not even ready for an alpha release, but I am using it to monitor my work web site without the chat functionality. I may need to find an alternate way to display the data if I can't track down the memory leak in Flash, which is something that has already consumed at least two weeks of evenings and weekends wasted trying to free memory and increase framerates. It's really making me question the wisdom of using Flash to develop a dekstop application, but it's what I know, so I'm using it for better or worse. Wish me luck. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 08 November 2006 )
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