[VCOM] Valentina and Flash for desktop applications -- new approa ch

[Olaf Schmidtmann]

Hi folks,

I already discussed this with Ruslan and suggested to make this a public
one. We already talked about this isse here. 
This is a long post but I want to give you the full picture.
My approach is once more to get Valentina and Flash *closely* together.
Without any html or xml crap - just locally - if possible on a client
without any installation.

My current task is to build a product cataogue and some other content which
will be delivered by our content management system. The idea is that the
customer can build a cd-rom (read-only and I it should work without admin
rights!) from his data and burn it anywhere on planet earth with a client.
This cd-rom should offer hierachically structured data of thousands of
products which can be searched. If the application is installed the data can
be updated via the web.

Since there is no Valentina extension for Flash (yet!) I was looking for
other paths to bring together Valentina and Flash MX or MX 2004. I don't
need to add reasons for using Valentina here, I guess ;-) I came upon these
strategies for my problem:

*** Project facts ***
- (Very) data centric application
- for Windows clients
- read-only (cd-rom) usage should be possible
- installation not mandatory
- need good search methods!
- multi-language support (utf-8)
- display commen web media (pictures, audio, video, flash)

*** Basic approaches ***
Build the project with...

1) Director & Valentina. 
I know how to do this and generally it works fine. But there are several
drawbacks: Director's UTF-8 support is equal to zero, nested GUI and menu
building is not very comfortable. I have to create the nested UI completely
with scripts/objects and cannot profit from Directors grafic interface;
working in a team is difficult, too. Director's text engine is a well-known
disaster and Flash has these wonderfull classes for standard elements :-)

2) Director, Flash and Valentina.
The next approach is to create the modell and data handling nearly completey
in Director and build the UI (presenter) with Flash to have the comfort and
the good looks. Quite good, but... Director already is a slow 'nd fat cow
trying to fly. Using embedded Flash does not make it better and the
communication between Flash and Director is rather circumstantial (e.g. no
callbacks).

3) Flash and no Valentina :-(
Everything can be done with XML-files in Flash, but searches would be
difficult and slow. Indexing must be done in a very intelligent way and this
makes everything less flexible. Flash is not very quick reading XML-files -
huge ones are not possible.

4) Flash, Screenweaver and Valentina
I already use Screenweaver (http://www.screenweaver.com) as development
enviroment to extent Flash desktop capabilities (it is great). With
Screenwaever it is possible to use dll files directly so it could be used to
connect to Valentina COM.

5) Something completey different
I do not want to start with something from the scratch but maybe there are
other solutions (like Runtime Revolution)?


I decided to give number 4 a try although I do not know anything about dlls
and how to use them.
I could connect to the VCOMC.dll with this method:
http://www.screenweaver.com/documentation/actionscript_reference/actionscrip
t_api/swinterface/calldllmethod.html .

{I had some problems here with dependencies on an MS library called
MSVCP71.dll but Ruslan helped me and maybe these can be overcome. I'll
report in another post.}

The Screenweaver COM module has some limitations: " Eight arguments is the
maximum number supported. Furthermore you may only pass primitive arguments:
booleans, integers or strings. You may prefix an argument's name with "ptr_"
in order to make Screenweaver handle the argument as a folder. When
specifying a pointer to a string argument, Screenweaver set the size of the
string to it's current length; so in order to create a stringbuffer of say
255 characters you would pass a string argument containing 255 blank spaces.
"

Very strange limits. (quote from Ruslan and I have nothing to add)


Sadly I have to say that the Screenweaver support is very slow (several
days!) and they just pointed to the (fu***) manual - very unprecise and no
real help, of course. Even worse is that the project has to be finished this
year and I already lostnearly four weeks because of a disease. I would be
very gratefull for any help because my planning phase is much shorter that I
expected, now. 8-(

Do you think this is the right way?
Do have any experience with an approach like this or one of the others?
Do I miss something important?

I still believe that Valentina and Flash could be an exciting combination -
even for desktop applications. Flash MX 2004 offers a very good conditions
for a development enviroment and there is no other database yet which can do
the job (I searched all over the web).

Thanks for you time!

Cheers
Olaf