David Deraedt

By now, you're probably aware of the fact that Flash CS6 includes several ways to export MovieClips to EaselJS SpriteSheets, for use with the CreateJS canvas-focused game library. This is great if you work with vector based assets. If this is your focus, I recently blogged about how you can improve the generated code to adapt to your needs.

This is a follow-up to my previous post, Edge Animate for developers, in which we covered the technical foundation of an Edge animate composition. In this post, we'll take a closer look at the scripting features of Edge Animate with the basics of Actions and symbol manipulation.

Actions scope

Edge Animate users create code snippets called Actions to be executed in response to some events. Events can be dispacthed by an DOM element (e.g. click), a symbol (e.g. creationComplete). Some events are dispatched by the timeline when the playhead hits a certain point. Those events are called Triggers.

Now that it's almost ready for launch, I think it's time to take a little more in-depth look at Edge Animate, from a technical perspective. As it's very likely to change over time, I'll try to maintain a (totally unofficial) reference over at my github, much like I did for Brackets.

As a follow-up to my previous post about how HTML files could be treated as application views, I'd like to take some time to dive deeper into a notion which has seemingly become essential in JS based application development: templating. And before you ask: yes, deep inside, I'm convinced this picture is absolutely relevant to this whole story. 

But first, please keep in mind that topic is still relatively new to me (at least when compared to my background with the flash platform) so the following is definitely subject to some caution and should be considered as "early conclusions". So I guess what I mean is that I'd really love to have your input on all this. ;)

As a front end developer, I've often been questioning whether HTML can really be treated as an application view descriptor, in particular in comparison with languages like, say, MXML. Of course, experience has shown that it could be done, but that necessary doesn't mean that it's the right tool for the job.

The first thing that strikes me, and what I'd like to share with you today, is the not so obvious relationship between html pages and application views, and the consequences in terms of strategies for source code organization.

HTML files, pages, and application views