Building Flex Integration with SHP

Besides AJAX, FLEX is the other major player in the RIA world (Silverlight might be a future contender, but it currently is not).  We already provided basic integration with Javascripts, now we want to provide the same level of integration with FLEX.


The lightest layer of integration would be to manage the flex files as static resources, and just make sure they work well within SHP.  But we can also opt for a closer integration by having SHP compile the flash video files, and make the compilation seamless.  Let's develop the light integration first.

What we want are the following:

• keep the flex video files in a static directory similar to other resources, i.e. in the $htdocs/flex/ directory
• simplify the generation of the <object> tag to load the appropriate video file

The tag should be as simple as the following SHP script:

;;  foo.shp ;; loads the foo.swf flash video
(flash "foo" #:width 550 #:height 400) 

Which should then be translated into the following xexpr:

<object width="550" height="400" id="foo" > 

<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /> 

<param name="movie" value="/flex/foo.swf" />
<embed src="/flex/foo.swf" width="550" height="400" name="foo" 

      type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" >
</embed></object>

This is quite straight forward:

(define flash-base-path (make-parameter "/flash")) 

(define (path->id path)
  (string-join (path-helper path) "_"))

(define (path-helper path)
  (cond ((pair? path) path)
        ((string? path) (regexp-split #px"\\/" path ))
        ((path? path) (path-helper (path->string path)))))

(define (flash-url path)
  (string-join (cons (flash-base-path) (path-helper path)) "/"))

(define (flash (path ($pathinfo)) #:id (id #f) #:base (base (flash-base-path)) #:height (height 400) #:width (width 400))
  (define (helper path id width height)
  `(object ((width ,width) 
            (height ,height) 
            (id ,id))
           (param ((name "movie") (value ,path)) "")
           (param ((name "allowscriptaccess") (value "always")) "")
           (embed ((src ,path)
                   (width ,width)
                   (height ,height)
                   (name ,id)
                   (type "application/x-shockwave-flash")
                   (allowscriptaccess "always")
                   ) "")))
  (helper (flash-url path)
          (if (not id) (path->id path) id)
          (number->string width)
          (number->string height)))

With the ability to generate the flash embedding xexpr, we now just need to create the static flash directory, require the module (we'll call it bzlib/flexer), and then use the above shp script in our code.

We'll talk about the tighter integration next time.  Cheers.