World: r3wp

(I think it does actually. Quite a nice game, Questionaut)

On stage 6 the first question bubble was undefined for the question 
and all the answers?

After clicking one of the undefined answers it then gave normal question/answers

Very nice Oldes, other than the one undefined question blip it played 
very nicely and looked great.

Sorry for partly missuing this channel, although you might have some 
answer for me. One regulatory company asked us to put online our 
company's annual report. Unfortunately, it is some older years, which 
are missing - 2005/6. And all I have is nicely done annual report 
in Flash. It is an .exe. But - each page is in separte subdir, where 
is plenty of .SWF files. I am looking into method of converting it 
into PDF, or something like that :-)

Our idea was to somehow get it at least printed, scanned, and put 
it into PDF (their requirement).

But maybe I will just click thru the presentation, do screenshots 
manually, put them into word or powerpoint file, and turn it into 
pdf, dunno ...

That's probably the easiest way:) It's hard to say as you can have 
whatever in your files which we don't see... they can be movies for 
example:)

mostly a menu, and texts ... but some texts are on multiple pages, 
while still in one SWF. There is something like 30 pages, so it might 
be easiest to do screenshots ....

I have some questions for our Flash experts:


1. Is it possible to open a plain socket from Flash to a remote host?
2. Can I modify the DOM of th browser from AS?

yes, yes

Cool. So, I could use Flash & AS without any visual flash sutff just 
to open a non-http channel to a server and get answers back into 
the Browser?

yes

but there are some security issues you have to count with

Can you be more specific about the security stuff?

No.. because I don't know, what exactly you want to do and in which 
version of Flash - the security model differs from version to version. 
http://www.google.com/search?q=flash+security+model

It's also important, if you want to access same domain or different 
domain and if you have control over the domain where you want to 
connect to.

As you have to allow the connection from the target domain. The reason 
is to prevent DoS attacks from Flash players.

I just want to open a socket to the same domain the falsh was read 
from.

The different security modles per version might be tricky, but I 
think I "just" need to get it right for versions 7.8.9 to cover most 
users.

What's a good tool to write AS and get a SWF compiled? Is it only 
the Adobe Flash CS3? It costs $700...

I just want to write some stuff code in AS and get it compiled.

If you want to write AS, then you can use:
 http://www.mtasc.org/

And or http://haxe.org/

And or download Flex sdk and look for /lib/asc.jar (AS compiler)

You may guess, that I'm using my own Rebol dialect instead.

For you, the first one... MTASC should be the best choice (to compile 
AS).

If you would like to compile AS3 (for Flash 9 and later) use the 
hexe. It's made by the same author.

Ok, great. Thanks for the tipp.

Is your Rebol dialect able to compile all AS stuff? I'm not interested 
in the graphics stuff but only in using Flash's socket stuff to do 
some networking code.

I would not call it AS compiler. It's not AS what I'm writing in 
my dialect. But I can do whatever you do in AS. The result of my 
compiler is same bytecode as you get compiling AS code. (just don't 
have support for AS3 bytecode as I don't need it much.

I do networking stuff. For example here is my experimental IRC like 
chat http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/chat.html

I took a look at this haxe stuff. Quite impressive. It really looks 
like these guys did a good job to give you a lingua france that can 
emit to the most common client and server technologies in use.

I think I will give it a try. We should add a Rebol emitter, using 
the PHP one as a starting point.

What is purpose of such emiter? Are you trying to suggest, that you 
can write general rebol code without limitations and have it "translated" 
to PHP for e.g.? Is that possible? All that REBOL dynamism, parser, 
etc.? Or are you talking about translating limited functionality, 
e.g. some dialect?

No, you can write Haxe code and create Rebol out of it that can be 
run on a server.

... and the point doing so is? :-)

I use one language as input and can generate the client side (flash, 
js) and server side (php, js, ... and maybe Rebol) out of my project.

Doing online apps etc. requires a non-rebol client technology as 
discussed in full-length in all kind of groups. And, I don't want 
to mess around with 100s of different technologies.

Writing Haxe code to get Rebol is useless. At least for me. I don't 
want to write Haxe, I want to write my own dialect.

As I use my dialect because I don't want to write AS.

Yes, I know. I would like to write Rebol as well but I can't reinvent 
the world all the time. And Haxe is c-ish enough to get it into my 
brain :-)

It would have more sense to write Rebol dialect to get Haxe or AS 
code. I was already thinking about it in the past but I never found 
enough motives and time to do it.

The entire Haxe project is basically doing a REBOL-style web dialect 
in Neko instead of REBOL.

Oldes, it might be the right time to start with such a thing. I need 
to play around with Haxe but it might really make sense.

Brian, sorry don't get it. Can you be more specific? I thought Haxe 
is an abstraction that can be compiled into Neko.

BTW: What is this Neko stuff about? Never heard about it. What's 
the USP of it?

Neko is another Nicolas Cannasse's (author of mtasc and haxe) project 
http://nekovm.org/

Maybe it's right time for you, but not for me as I really don't have 
a time for it at this moment. And it doesn't make too much practical 
sense to me.  Especially if I'm able to get the bytecode myself.

More specific: Haxe is based on Neko and even the Flash and other 
web target code is generated by internal Neko code, even if the target 
is not more Neko code. The web dialect that Haxe implements is similar 
to the kind of dialect that you would implement to do the same thing 
in REBOL, though the syntax is different because the language underlying 
Haxe is Neko, not REBOL.