From the Peanut Gallery

To my way of thinking:

1. Absorbing other systems and using them as a servent is one of the major attributes of Perl.
2. A significant weakness of Perl is that it does not support audio and video to the normal level of Perl excellence.
3. Part of what makes Perl so strong, is that so many problems can be reduced to simple data types.
4. Flash ActionScript has many weaknesses. A great strength is that it simplifies audio and video by giving the programmer simple data types to do symbol manipulations with Audio and Video data.
5. One could argue that wherever Perl is strong, Flash ActionScript is weak, and vise versa.

Previous efforts to support Flash files in Perl were crippled because before you can start you have to create a program to compile SWF files. By the time someone makes any progress, they need to get a paying job or are faced with a new version of Flash. But, with Flash MX 2004, this is no longer a problem. It is trivial to write a Perl script to automate the Flash tool to compile FLA files to SWF files. ( I can post code if people want ).

Likewise, with #include scripts, a Perl script can easily write a text file and have ActionScripts included in the SWF file. Therefore, the power of Perl to manage text can be brought to bear on ActionScripts. Seems a library of code generating tools could be written in Perl to make it easy to write certain ActionScripts, much as a person can now write HTML with Perl modules without bothering to learn all the HTML details.

I was wondering if anyone else thought that there was a need to add Flash ActionScripting capabilities to Perl, so that it was just another tool in the Perl toolbox??? Just curious, as I am not a programmer with great experience. Part of what got me thinking this was the Perl/Tk module, where Perl lifts a nice GUI from Tk, then puts a wrapper on it, so Perl users can get Tk goodness without learning TCL.

PS... Here is a rough draft of code to make the idea possibly clearer. If it is the broken version, let me know and I will post fixes.

http://HenryJamesFeltus.com/flash_djinni/flash_djinni.htm

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