Bringing Flex and Flash Even Closer to the Web

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One of the biggest complaints people have about Flash is that you can’t really link into anything in a Flash app. It’s just an embedded SWF that lives in a sandbox on an HTML page. This also meant the back button wouldn’t work, so Flex/Flash felt very different from the browser experience and it was something that’s been criticized in parts of the community. There are some significant theoretical arguments about what the back button should actually do in the context of an application, and that has also been part of the problem. Today we got to see how Flex 3 is going to help make this conversation better – we’re supporting deep linking (you’ll have to scroll down a bit to that section, but Ted has some good examples).

Ted has the scoop, but we’ve implemented a way for Flex developers to change the URL as people move around their application. That means the back button will work, it means you can link to a specific point in a Flex app, and gives developers flexibility to decide how it should be implemented. I’m not entirely convinced that anyone has a solution to the question “what do I do with the back button in a web application” but with this release of Flex, we’re empowering developers to make that decision. It’s going to bring Flex applications closer to the browser which should make a lot of people happy.

[tags]Flex, Browser, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

Related posts:

  1. Stop Thinking of Flex As a Browser Technology. Seriously. Stop It.
  2. Praise for Flex and Rich Internet Applications
  3. Putting Flex and Flash to Work on the Vista Sidebar
  4. Flash Platform Takes a Leap with Flex Builder 2 Beta
  5. Flex, Flash and Apollo on everything from Digg to Facebook
  • http://professorfripples.com/blog David Hamiter

    It’s funny in a post about deep linking that your link to Ted’s post doesn’t go to the section you refer to. He shoulda used a few #s, huh? I’m excited about this… just noting the irony is all.

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    I thought of that EXACT same thing. As I was linking it I was thinking (“Ted, you really should anchor the HTML as well as your Flex example”). Maybe I’ll bug him about that :)

  • http://onflex.org Ted Patrick

    What is an Anchor tag? Kidding. When I get some spare time, I will anchor those posts in.

    Ted :)

  • http://fiveforefun.blogspot.com Jen

    I think Sim is presenting on this topic at 360Flex … looking forward to learning more about this! :)

  • http://www.bobjim.com Ryan Campbell

    Looks like Flex 3 is going to have some really great new features! Can’t wait for the beta

  • http://www.rooftopsolutions.nl/ Evert

    It still sounds like a hack though.. hijacking the browser navigation buttons through browser plugin api’s.

    The problem is much deeper, not at browser navigation toolbar, but the url paradigm.. As long as I won’t be able to do a wget or use curl to fetch the data, flash won’t be getting any closer to ‘the web’ you are talking about.

    It’s great for user experience though, don’t get me wrong. I just sort of think you shouldn’t want to try to fit flash into the web as an alternative to native webapplications. So this comment is not so much critique about this new feature, but more about your first paragraph. Its a problem that is because of the nature of the flash technology unsolvable. (and thats ok).

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  • http://www.picnik.com Darrin Massena

    We’ve been supporting deep links, the back button, and deep bookmarks in Picnik (e.g. http://www.picnik.com/app#/in/webcam) since we launched with the help of Joe Berkovitz’ UrlKit (http://joeberkovitz.com/blog/urlkit). Highly recommended if you don’t want to wait for Flex 3 to RTM.

    One crazy thing we just learned about these ‘hash links’. They break Flash preloaders! Browsers seem to feel they need to preload all the content when an anchor reference is in the URL. Clear your cache and try this:

    http://www.3gcomm.fr/Flex/PrimitiveExplorer/Flex2PrimitiveExplorer.html

    then clear your cache and try again with this:

    http://www.3gcomm.fr/Flex/PrimitiveExplorer/Flex2PrimitiveExplorer.html#whatever

    I’d love to know if Flex 3 has found a way around this!

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