Druplex

Yesterday Steve and I pushed through some updates to our SWFAddress module to support the new version 2.1 of the SWFAddress library and also changed it to use the new SWFObject 2.0 library. SWFAddress 2.1 brings a new and improved SEO script which works very well with Drupal. We've also fulfilled our one feature request and added support for percentage height and width for the Flash embed instead of just pixel dimensions.

With these updates we have green-lighted a stable release of our module, calling it version 1.1. We are currently working on an awesome new project in stealth mode that will be using what we're going to call version 2.x of the SWFAddress module which will support not only search engine optimized full Flash site support but also full AJAX site support too! We are super excited about this and can't wait to tell you all about it!

So if you're looking for a way to do super powerful content managed Flash, Flex, or AJAX sites, watch this space for some exciting news to come and start checking out the SWFAddress module for Drupal!

One of my favorite quotes from DrupalCon Boston '08 was Leslie Hawthorne's, "Drupal makes sandwiches happen." The quote I think describes just how amazing the Drupal community really is -- people going out of their way to help other people. The past few weeks have been big weeks for me in large part due to my involvement in the Drupal community. Ever since Steve and I first spoke about Druplash at DrupalCampWI in January we have been trying our best to give back to the community by organizing and speaking at more events. This led to speaking at DrupalCon '08 about our research in Drupal-powered Flash and Flex applications. While we were in Boston, I met Claudio Luis Vera, a partner at Studio:Module, a firm working with the MIT Media Lab on a new Drupal-powered website. Claudio invited Steve and I to come with him to MIT to present some of our research, which we happily agreed to do -- because it got us a quick tour of the Media Lab which we've both dreamed about seeing.

Who would have guessed that this chance meeting at DrupalCon would start the ball rolling on some major life changes for me.

Today was Steve's and my presentation on how to build content-managed Flash sites using Drupal. I'd just like to say thanks to everyone who came out and for the great questions. We've posted our slides as a PDF up on the session page at the DrupalCon Boston site and you can download them here as well.

Both Brian and I are at DrupalCon 2008 in Boston this week. We will be giving our presentation about content-managed Flash and Flex sites with Drupal tomorrow night at 4:45 PM, but we’re both going to focus far more on the Drupal side of things and touch briefly on the ActionScript and Flash, so that even Flash and Flex neophytes will understand the entire backend, setup, and use cases.

If you would like to learn more about how to use the Flash / Flex stack, however, you have two options to get training from Developer Community Champions that we should mention.

It's official, Steve's and my presentation titled "Druplash and Druplex: Content-Managed Flash and Flex sites powered by Drupal" has been accepted at DrupalCon Boston 2008. We'll be presenting on strategies to create easy-to-maintain Flash and Flex sites which degrade nicely for iPhone and mobile users and maximum search engine friendliness using the Drupal content management framework.

The presentation will contain an overview of historical problems with 100% Flash websites, how with a variety of popular free toolsets most of these problems can now be overcome, different ways to get dynamic data into Flash and Flex, how the Web Services layer of Drupal makes it really easy to get data into Flash and Flex, and show some demo sites we've been producing.

Steve and I are both really excited to be heading off to our first DrupalCon and to even be presenting there!

There are a lot of really great tutorials out on Drupal.org and Adobe's sites which describe methods for using Flex with Drupal through Services and AMFPHP. (For a list of some tutorials, I'll post references at the bottom of the post) Remoting in Flex is super easy with the <mx:RemoteObject> but the one thing I noticed with all of the tutorials is that they all describe just one way of using RemoteObjects and Methods to get data from Drupal.

Imagine, if you will, that you have built a super awesome Drupal site heavily using the Views module. Now you want to tap into all of that data to create a Flex application, whether it's a new Druplex front-end for your entire site or maybe just a simple management tool.

As Brian's previous post says, we've had this idea for Druplash (which means Drupal, Flash, Services/AMFPHP, and most importantly SWFAddress) since last spring. We've both been involved in Drupal in the last several years. Brian got an earlier start, and I was first exposed to Drupal through Kevin Reynen's vision for its use at Bradley University.

Brian and I get ready to deliver the first incarnation of our presentation on Druplash/Druplex.

My feelings about Drupal are probably best expressed through a comment that webchick made in IRC last weekend, which I will poorly paraphrase here, "Whenever I have a website project, I look at how I can fit Drupal to it."

Drupal's an amazing project, and you get so much with an install of Drupal - user and role management, a very secure login system, the flexibility of using theme functions to easily change output, using locale to translate parts of the user interface you want to change, and FormAPI, which I have just started working with over the past two weeks.

I bring this up because Brian and I had both been using Drupal for at least a year and a half, yet we hadn't really jumped into the community yet. Brian had gone to one Central Illinois Drupal meetup which I couldn't attend due to a musical engagement, and we'd each submitted a patch or two: I did an exceedingly simple patch to Services, and Brian submitted some new functionality back to WebFM.

Regardless, DrupalCampWI would really open my eyes to how vast the Drupal community is and how I could take part.

Tonight, Steven Merrill and I committed and released our first beta version of SWFAddress.module for Drupal 5.x. We demo'd an early alpha version at DrupalCampWI a few weeks ago and Steve has been hard at work shoring it up for release.

Steve and I came up with the concept for Druplash and Druplex (what we call Drupal powered Flash and Flex sites) about a year ago and have just been toying with them ever since. We recently got ourselves in gear when Steve needed to build a new portfolio (link coming soon) for his future career as an opera singer.

Using the great SWFObject and SWFAddress javascript libraries and the Services and AMFPHP Modules for Drupal, we figured out how to build full Flash and Flex experience sites which degrade nicely to full HTML underneath for SEO.

Saturday, January 19, 2008, Steven Merrill and I gave our presentation on Druplash and Druplex at DrupalCampWI. DrupalCampWI was a blast and we had a great crowd for our presentation with some great discussion afterward. Larry Garfield, newly elected Drupal Association Board member wrote up a review of the event and had this to say about our presentation:

My favorite presentation, though, was given by a team from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. They've been working on integrating Drupal with Flash and Flex, and have done some impressive things with it. I've tended to avoid Flash on the ground that I didn't want to bother with a proprietary binary blob. However, Adobe has just in the past several weeks made big strides towards open sourcing Flash, to the point that it is now possible, supposedly, to develop, compile, deploy, and view Flash using no proprietary software. That piques my interest.

What piqued my interest even more, though, is that they're working on a SWFAddress module (as in, wrote one the day before) that they plan to contribute. SWFAddress is a Flash plugin that lets a Flash page have a bookmarkable URL. A bookmarkable, Google-friendly, deep-linking, open source, Drupal-based, Flash web site? OK, now I'm interested! They've already signed up to give a presentation at DrupalCon Boston. You want to see it! (As if you need another reason to go to DrupalCon...)

-- Larry Garfield, speaking about Brian and Steven's Druplash / Druplex presentation (Read his whole blog post.)

Brian McMurray and I will be presenting at DrupalCamp Wisconsin in January.

He and I will do a session on using Drupal to content-manage Flash and/or Flex sites and I may have a student who will be working on the same thing there. (We like to call these techniques Druplash and Druplex, respectively.)