Adam has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I remember reading somewhere, not that long ago, that there was a Perl module to write SWF format files (Shockwave Flash). Since SWF is, as far as I know, an open standard, I don't doubt the existence of such a module. But a search of CPAN turned up nothing. Does anyone know where I could find such a module?

Corollary: If SWF can be written by Perl, can it be written directly to an http server? Could a dynamic flash be made this way? Thoughts to think.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: SWF Flash Module?
by davorg (Chancellor) on Dec 29, 2000 at 00:11 UTC
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      Stable or not, the demos are very impressive. I'll definately take a look at this. Thanks.
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Re: SWF Flash Module?
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 29, 2000 at 01:52 UTC
    Yeah, i have used one of the SWF modules for Flash.

    Its just a wrapper around libswf.a, created by some generous individual at SGI.

    It supports the Flash-3 command set (i.e. no Flash4/Flash5 style scripting), so extensive Flash scripting support is what you want, you may be on your own (forced to implement the SWF spec yourself) unless there is another project that includes this.

    I wasn't able to get the control i wanted over my Flash presentations with this module - i.e i couldn't get the 'jump to frame and stop' actions working properly, so eventually (I was somewhat time-constrained) i gave up using it and the project i was looking at using it for is now based on Java servlets creating GIFs on-the-fly.

    Still, for simply creating a static Flash page, the module works quite well.

    You can find it at http://the-labs.com/PerlFlash/

    Hope that helps.

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      Do you know if there is any other development in that direction?

      Flash::* depends on libswf, so I wouldn't be able to install it on a server where I can only upload to my home direcotry, right?
      There are useful ready-made tools like swift-generator (http://www.swift-tools.com) which unfortunately comes without sources.
      I am very interested in generating SWF using Perl, with modules entirely in Perl not depending on anything else. But I doubt that I have the experience to write such a package, and I surely don't have the time to do so :(

      I'd like to know how many people are around that are also regularly using both Perl and Flash.
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        check out SWF::Builder and SWF::File at search.cpan.org all perl and very thorough. wish there were more examples, tho. -=trickyelf>
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Re: SWF Flash Module?
by isotope (Deacon) on Dec 30, 2000 at 00:38 UTC
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Re: SWF Flash Module?
by sonofsamiam (Initiate) on Dec 30, 2000 at 01:49 UTC
    I've successfully done on-the-fly flash from cgis w/ Bukoo (http://www.geocities.com/yiyisun/bukoo/) and Win32::OLE. Kinda weird, kinda slow, but it worked like it was supposed to. And I wouldn't reccommend it for any kind of a heavy load. But, hey, you know...
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