You do not do everything with Flex components, especially if you develop games or cool interfaces. You often need to load SWF files and use the MovieClips inside them. A previous article talks about Instantiating and displaying MovieClips from loaded SWF.

Here are a few considerations when loading MovieClips into Flex:

• If you embed a symbol, you will lose all timeline actions. Embed the whole SWF instead.


• If you have a stop on the first frame of a multi-frame MovieClip, it might never execute. Add the action on the second frame.


• When you say gotoAndStop (or gotoAndPlay), you cannot immediately reference the children on that frame. You have 3 choices:
  
  
  
  • Use stage.invalidate() and listen to RENDER events
  
  
  • Listen to ADDED events and check if the target of the event is the object that you need.
  
  
  • Forget about frames and do like Flex intended: one symbol per MovieClip state (button states for example)
  
  


• If your MovieClip is 1-frame long, it will still loop indefinitely, consuming precious resources. Use stop() on the first frame.


• When you use the addChild method with the MovieClip, the clip will not be copied. It will be removed from its previous parent (firing the REMOVED_FROM_STAGE event) and then added to the new parent.


• You cannot duplicate a MovieClip. If you want to be able to create multiple instances, link these MovieClips in you SWFlibrary and instantiate as many as you want.


• A MovieClip cannot be added directly to Flex containers. Add it as a child of a SWFLoader or an Image and add that control.


• The Loader class is a DisplayObject but has trouble resizing itself. You can always grab the loader.content as a MovieClip and add it where you need it.

The codeFest is now over. It went really well. We had about 20 developers yesterday. It was really productive for most people. Some learned a lot. The event was beneficial to the community.

With Yann Larrivée and Louis-Philippe Huberdeau, I was able to make much progress on the PHP Quebec website (jobs section). The new version should be available in a couple of weeks.

The next codeFest should be somewhere in September. For those who don't know, the codeFest is a weekend for contributing to Open Source or community projects. People gather with their laptops and spend the weekend coding. It beats working alone at home!

For more information, visit the codeFest website.

After moving my databases and websites to a new Mac with Leopard, none of the websites were working. It was as if mod_rewrite was not working. First, I noticed that the .htaccess files were all ignored. I checked the Apache configuration file in MAMP, and everything seemed fine. After over an hour of going through blogs and forums, I finally get it: Leopard (it's my first day with it) has its own configuration file in a private folder. That file is not allowing htaccess files.

Solution
1. Open /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
2. Line 175 and 210: change AllowOverride none to AllowOverride All
3. Restart your server
4. Yay!

I stayed at work until 8:00 pm today because I could not figure out why I was getting a #1065 Reference Error when using Runtime Sharing.

The scenario
A main ActionScript application loads multiple swf files (screens). These swf import various symbols from a central swf (global_asset_library). When I load the first screen, I can see in ServiceCapture that the global_assets_library is requested, because the screen imports assets from it. When I load a second screen that should import assets from the same library, it does not request it, probably because it’s cached. It however displays a #1065 error and leaves a blank where I should have seen my beautiful scenery. So I could not load any subsequent screens because they use Runtime Sharing.

What happened internally?
From good old-fashioned trial-and-error and some incomplete documentation, I figured out that each swf, by default, loads the global_asset_library in its own context (security domain). That means that any other screen is now prohibited from accessing whatever was loaded by the first screen. Our global_asset_library (and I stress Global) now became the sole property of the first screen. Not what we want.

What do we do now?
We use a nice little class called LoaderContext from the flash.system package (AS projects don’t need to be converted to Flex - yay!). This LoaderContext will allow us to load all swf into the application, instead of the swf that requests it.

Show us the code!
var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest(swfPath);
var context:LoaderContext = new LoaderContext();
context.applicationDomain = ApplicationDomain.currentDomain;
var loader:Loader = new Loader();
loader.load(request,context);

The conference is now over. I got 16 hours of sleep and am ready to work on the video that will be provided to the visitors and speakers within a few weeks (90% certainty).

The conference gets better each year. This year we got better food and I am sure that everyone from last year noticed. The wireless was actually working this year. No PHP conference can go by without it. It did take us a couple of hours to fix it in the beginning though so I ask forgiveness from the first speakers who were limited by that fact. We organized a job fair and a cocktail with free drinks for everyone.

I saw a few sessions and they were really great. The PHP Labs that were a new concept this year were also great. There was much interactivity and the feedback from the visitors was positive.

The post-conference activities (restaurant, 2 Pierrots and sugar shack) were really fun. I can't wait for next year!

Please post links to photo albums in the comments.