Gaia Flash Framework; Easy Site Creation

POSTED IN Actionscript, Design | TAGS : Gaia Flash Framework, quick prototyping, SWFAddress, SWFObject November 26, 2008

I was contacted to do a somewhat small site.  They wanted a backend for data entry, then a flash frontend to hook the clients to use their services.  Simple enough.

At first, I would do what I normally always do: do it from scratch.  I would use code I used in the past and improve it for any specific needs.  I did that for the prototype which worked great.

Then someone mentioned the Gaia Flash Framework.  My perception of flash page based websites changes entirely.

One of the bigger problems with a flash page is the actual content, all the different windows having different design and on top of that, if you wanted to show a certain page to someone else, you couldn’t just send over a specific link to the page.  Well, all that changed.  They use SWFObject and SWFAddress to display the movie and then make sure the url changes on the specific page.  Every page is a ‘transitionIn’ and ‘transitionOut’ function so you can add your own custom animation to it.

This saved me a lot of time.  Gaia is easy to use and has good documentation.  You can have a site up in minutes.  Everything’s open source, well commented and properly designed. Hats off to the Gaia team; keep up the good work boys.