Major Platform Update…
Late
last week we release the yourminis widget API (wAPI), an Actionscript
3.0 Library that allows flash content owners to quickly and easily
create engaging widgets that run on both the web and desktop. We
developed the wAPI from the ground up with information collected from
our development community to improve the development and overall widget
experience. Some of the additional benefits include:
- Simple Widget Publishing – The latest API
allows content owners to publish their existing Actionscript 3.0
widgets/apps and take advantage of a majority of the syndication and
reporting features with absolutely no code changes. Our previous
release required that users download our SDK and make code changes
before publishing to yourminis.
- Online API Reference – Our latest wAPI
Reference is now available online from our developer at
http://www.yourminis.com/developers/docs/as3/index.html . The wAPI
Reference docs outline all the packages, classes, methods, events, and
properties of the object-oriented, actionscript 3.0 widget API
library. The docs are generated from our wAPI source and include
sample code snippets throughtout. Additionally, the online tutorials
reference the docs with links directly to the API being referenced
making learning the yourminis widget API that much easier.
- Dynamic API Binding – All widgets developed
using the yourminis wAPI Actionscript 3.0 library no longer statically
link to the API classes. This provides the ability to develop on the
wAPI without any downloads, using any text/actionscript editor, on any
platform. We do encourage users to download our SDK which includes an
.mxp Flash CSE Extension specifically built to make the widget
development process easier.
- Event Listeners – The wAPI leverages
Actionscript 3.0 EventListener class to dispatchEvents to listening
objects. This allows developers to write more advanced widgets that
may have multiple listeners and a complex object hierarchy than was
previously possible with the previous yourminis Actionscript 2 widget
API.
- Object-Oriented Improvements – We have further
broken the main widget functions into separate classes. This helps
make the code easier to understand and to write. As well, classes such
as the HTTPLoader and RSSLoader extend and incorporate existing flash
classes and methods making it easier to transition from existing code.
For example, calling widget.navigateToURL instead of flash’s
navigateToURL will add both URL click tracking to your widget and
myspace click support. If you have code that handles RSSParsing based
on a URLLoader, you can use the same code while utilizing the RSSLoader
in place of the URLLoader (RSSLoader extends URLLoader)
In addition to the aforementioned widget benefits, developers get
all of the innate advantages of using Actionscript 3.0 including (for
an overview, check out
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/actionscript3_overview.html)
- Faster processing - “ActionScript 3.0
introduces a new highly optimized ActionScript Virtual Machine, AVM2,
which dramatically exceeds the performance possible with AVM1. As a
result, ActionScript 3.0 code executes up to 10 times faster than
legacy ActionScript code.”
- ECMAScript for XML (E4X) – “E4X offers a
natural, fluent set of language constructs for manipulating XML. Unlike
traditional XML parsing APIs, E4X makes XML feel like a native data
type of the language. E4X streamlines the development of applications
that manipulate XML by drastically reducing the amount of code needed.”
- Regular Expressions – “ActionScript 3.0
includes native support for regular expressions so you can quickly
search for and manipulate strings. ActionScript 3.0 implements the
regular expressions defined in the ECMAScript Language Specification
(ECMA-262).”
- Type safety – “In ActionScript 2.0, type
annotations were primarily an aid for developers; at runtime, all
values were dynamically typed. In ActionScript 3.0, type information
is preserved at runtime and utilized for a number of purposes. Flash
Player performs runtime type checking, improving the system’s type
safety. Type information is also used to represent variables in native
machine representations, improving performance and reducing memory
usage.”
- Run-time exceptions – “In ActionScript 2.0,
many runtime errors would fail in a graceful but silent fashion. This
ensured that Flash Player would not display some inexplicable dialog
box, which JavaScript did in early web browsers. On the other hand,
this lack of error reporting made it more challenging to debug
ActionScript programs. ActionScript 3.0 introduces a variety of
runtime exceptions for common error conditions, improving the debugging
experience and enabling applications that handle errors robustly.
Runtime errors can provide stack traces annotated with source file and
line number information, helping to pinpoint errors quickly.”
Last but not least, widgets within the yourminis platform continue to take advantage of benefits including:
- Automatic Copying - of your widget to the top
startpages, blogging platforms, social networks, and desktop widget
platforms, along with inline email sharing
- Tracking - of views, time spent, users,
geolocation, interactions, URL clicks, copies, and custom actions for
your widget with detailed reporting.
- HTTP/RSS - Proxying, caching, authorization,
conversion of RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, ATOM 0.3, and ATOM 1.0 to RSS 2.0 of
3rd party data feeds (without the need for crossdomain.xml)
- Management Dashboard - for updating content, widget configurations, blacklisting, syndication destinations, and 3rd party gallery publishing
- Global caching network - for faster widget downloads…
Look for added enhancements to our platform over the coming weeks….
