I don’t do flash myself: in this company, flash is generally used just for design elements, so the designers build the flash and my job is just getting it onto the site. All fine so far, but now one of the designers wants to move to using Flash Catalyst.
Here’s my understanding of how it works. If I’m wrong, please tell me.
- Flash Catalyst outputs one .swf file containing the application.
- External files (images, videos, audio files) may be referenced, but by default are embedded into the .swf.
- The flex framework is stored in .swz files. These files are signed by Adobe and therefore flash considers them safe to store in a “flash cache” separate from the browser cache. These framework files may be reused on any other site, and therefore reduce download times.
- If you don’t have the .swz files, and the person viewing your site doesn’t already have them cached, they can be downloaded from the Adobe site.
If I’m right so far, here’s my question:
Can I have the .swz files stored anywhere on my server, or do they need to be in the same folder as the .swf? I assume they can be anywhere, but I’d have to tell Flash Catalyst where to look for them.
SWZ files must be in the same folder as the SWF.
I think you understand, conceptually, how Flash Catalyst works. However, you should remember that Flash Catalyst is a design tool. It does not allow you to integrate with remote data services. It would be considered extremely rare to build a Flex application without some form of backend. Most people will not be generating swfs directly from Flash Catalyst; they’ll be importing the Catalyst project into Flash Builder and making the ‘mockup / wireframe’ work.