One week before the launch of project80Days, google-maps killed the open-soruce AS2 support for the map and I was without a map, project80Days being an older project that I never had bothered to update to 3.
The map being the heart of the app was more than a bummer. So I was eager somehow get this sorted. Absolutely to my surprise(or maybe not, oh holy internet), I remembered that I can have and AS2 movie running in a AS3 container, no problem, but I needed communication between those. No normally AVM1 containers are like black boxes to AS3, so what to do.
SWFBridge is a free and seemingly easy to implement solution, and it saved my behind. It uses the LocalConnection class of flash and is fairly easy to implement, yet a nightmare to debug as flash was consistently crashing when I was running the app, maybe due to the heavy activity of the AVM1 movie.
So far after using it for nearly two weeks, I would still recommend it as a quick fix, or good solution, as long as you don’t have too much communication going on between AS2 and AS3. The slight time delay restricts it’s use a bit and coding for a time delay, when you have dependencies, made me split up many of my processes.
On the top of that, I discovered, that after using it for a while (speak reloading the movie in Firefox on mac, it stopped communicating and I had to restart the browser. Same goes for the crashes, when it takes down Flash(and Flash is my top-list crasher, if not only anyways) a LocalConnection seems to keep lingering, making it unable to establish a new connection on the same movie. I had to restart the laptop everytime that happened.
So if you are in dire need, take it and it will do it’s job, for a clean job, update to AS3.
I put a copy of the class on my server: download here
or get it from where I found it at gskinner.com
