Tim Walling

I’ve been working on a Flex 2 component which exposes the Yahoo! Maps API similar to the official Flex 1.5 version. There seems to be a lot of interest in getting an official, updated version of the maps API and in the meantime several people have blogged about ways of communicating to a Flash 8 SWF which contains the Yahoo! Maps Flash component.

I played around with this a while back going with the ExternalInterface approach. I’ve since dumped that approach in favor of using LocalConnection. I’ve encapsulated all the communication into a Flex 2 component which you can just drop into your Flex application. I’m going to be finishing up a few things on it this weekend after which I’ll release the component, along with source. I’m posting a preview of it now to see how much interest there is in the project. The first release of the component will only expose the most common API elements and then I’ll plan out a roadmap for adding more of the Flex 1.5 API.

You can view the demo here:
http://timwalling.com/sandbox/flexmap/preview/

The code for the demo:

Since all of the communication is taken care of by the component, you should be able to use the component just like the Flex 1.5 version using all of the standard map events and map methods.

Update:
I’m open to project name ideas. For obvious reasons, I won’t be keeping the component name “YahooMap”.

I’ve updated my Yahoo Maps application to use the latest version of FlashInterface. Robert re-worked the API a bit so it’s even easier to use and requires less coding. I’ll try to post the source tonight. See my earlier post for more details on what this Flex 2 / Flash 8 Yahoo Maps application is all about.

One downfall to this approach of using Yahoo Maps in a Flex 2 app is the fact that you have to code a Flash 8 SWF which exposes all of the functionality of the Yahoo Maps component. Now that Robert has released SWFAdapter, I’d like to see if it’s possible to use the same SWF that the Yahoo Javascript-Flash API uses. After a little digging around in the javascript I noticed that a SWF is loaded and then talked to via a javascript API. By looking through all of the code I’m guessing one could use SWFAdapter to make all of the same calls on that SWF. I’m not sure if this goes against anything in the Yahoo Maps terms of use so I’ll have to read that over some more before I release anything for distribution.

I’ve been meaning to experiment with this for some time and was reminded of it with the recent release of FlashInterface. Currently there’s no Flex 2 component for Yahoo Maps and since Flash 9 content can’t talk directly to Flash 8 content I wondered how one might use the Yahoo Maps Flash component in a Flex 2 application I always knew LocalConnection was a possibility but hadn’t thought about using ExternalInterface until I came across the solution I mentioned above. I figured this would be a great chance to try out FlashInterface and complete my proof of concept all in one shot.

I’ll post the source code soon as I plan on making more updates to this. I might also use it as a chance to play with UrlKit some more and knock out another task I’ve been meaning to get done. There might be a few issues with this example right now, I’ve noticed that the mouse handling seems to be a bit funky when one tries to click on the map marker. I think the Flex application is intercepting the click before the Flash component is so I’ll have to fix that.

Launch Flex 2 Yahoo Maps

I’ll be speaking at the Web Builder 2.0 conference coming up December 4-6. I’ll be covering the topic of how Flash developers can best utilize their skill set within a Flex project.

I’ve come across many Flash developers (myself included at one time) who immediately see Flex as a replacement for much of what they do. When I finally jumped into Flex development I quickly realized it fit very well with how I liked to author Flash applications. My goal with this talk is to give Flash developers an understanding of what Flex offers as well as where they could get involved on a project.

This will be my first speaking engagement so I’m pretty excited about it and it also happens to be my first trip to Vegas so overall it should be a great experience. I’m making sure I go out a few days early of course to get some poker playing out of the way.

The company I work for, Allurent (http://www.allurent.com), is in need of good creative/UI designers. The needs vary, in one case we need a product designer to lead on a project and in the other we’re looking for a mid/senior level designer (strong visually and with a strong UI background) to work on a large project who is able to take creative ideas and implement them.

We’re based in Cambridge, MA (Harvard Square) and candidates should be local. The positions/needs I just mentioned are more fulltime as opposed to freelance but we’d also like to establish a relationship with people who may just want to occasionally take on design work on a per project basis.

Drop me a line if you’re interested or have questions.