It's my great pleasure to announce that after six months of alphas and betas, SWX PHP 1.0 and SWX ActionScript Library 1.0 are now available for download.
SWX is officially out of beta!
The major changes from SWX PHP Release Candidate 1 include a revamped Start Page with new, royalty-free icons, and a friendly new list view for the Services and Flash examples folders.
I've also updated the SWX Nabaztag API so that you can now specify the voice that you want your Nabaztag bunny to talk in and you can move its ears and send it ear and LED choreographies. You can test out and use the SWX Nabaztag API and the other SWX APIs (Flickr, Twitter, etc.) directly from the Public SWX Gateway using the SWX Service Explorer.
Finally, there's a new LOG_ALL configuration option in swx_config.php that determines whether non-error (status, info, profiling) messages are written to the PHP error log. Set this to false on deployments for better performance. The setting defaults to true as it is useful for troubleshooting during development.
Update: Based on Jon MacDonald's suggestion (thanks, Jon!), I've also created a SWX PHP Deployment Bundle to make it easier for you to deploy SWX PHP to your server. Use the regular SWX PHP and SWX PHP MAMP Bundles to develop with and then deploy the lean-and-mean deployment bundle to your server. The deployment bundle is much smaller than the regular build as it doesn't contain the source code for the Flex-based tools or the sample Flash FLA files.
The release of SWX PHP 1.0 and SWX ActionScript Library 1.0 is something I've been looking forward to for quite a while now and I hope that SWX simplifies your development life and makes it as fun for you to create Flash and Flash Lite applications and mashups as it has for me.
In the next two months, I'm going to be traveling around the world to talk about SWX at FlashForward Boston, FlashForum Conference in Germany, MAX Chicago, MAX Barcelona, FITC Hollwood, MAX Japan, and Flash on the Beach in my home town of Brighton, in the UK. In addition to this, development work continues (I just made my first post-1.0 commit to the SVN repository) and will include efforts to create a Flash 9 version of SWX PHP, as well as SWX RPC implementations for Ruby, Python, J2EE, and .Net.
In the next few days, I will be releasing Internet Drafts for SWX and SWX RPC which I hope will become Informational RFCs.
Here's to Version 1.0! This is just the beginning.
Read the full release notes for SWX PHP 1.0 and download the 1.0 release.
The SWX PHP and SWX ActionScript Library Version 1.0 Released article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Ciao Aral,
congratulations and great work!!!
Alessandro
[...] Aral released SWX PHP and SWX ActionScript Library Version 1.0. This is a great achievement and really great work. I am going to be showcasing one of Aral examples for Flash Lite at MAX based on SWX. [...]
[...] Today Aral Balkan released SWX 1.0 for PHP, his answer to Flash Remoting. I have been waiting patiently for this release, as I am currently in the midst of building out two larger-scale projects with remoting and feel much better about using a 1.0 (read: non-beta) tool. Overall, SWX has been a joy to use. Aral has certainly accomplished his main task: simplify the whole remoting process from setup to development to deployment. Setup is as easy as copying the directory to your server, and development is much more kind since he re-wrote the AMFPHP service browser and debugger in Flex, while adding a few features to make it generally more usable. Using the services in your AS2 projects also couldn’t be more simple. And to top it all off it is completely open source (is anything Aral does not open source?). I was initially concerned about performance under heavy loads, but Aral was quick to give a test case and show that even with 250 concurrent hits to the gateway, it should still perform. It would take an extremely busy site to get 250 concurrent hits to the gateway (note that the gateway only gets hit when there is a service call). [...]
SWX out of BETA…
Swapdepths congrats Aral Balkan for the version 1 release of SWX.
The SWX PHP and the Actionscript library both turned one yesterday.
Why SWX ?
Cause it’s a simpel elegant (and not to forget native) way of handling the data in you flash applicati…
Hy Aral,
nice work.
Whats the ETA on the Internet Drafts being available?
I’ve made a start on porting SWX to .NET and they’d be really useful
Thanks and congrats
Greg
Hey there,
This is Caroline from SocialRank.
I am trying to get in touch with you but couldn’t find your email address.
We’re launching a new Web 2.0 site dedicated to Flash and we have started indexing your blog posts as part of our content filter.
I’d like to send you an invite to a beta preview. Can you get back to me with your email address.
Mine is caroline@justflashing.com
Kind regards,
Caroline
http://www.SocialRank.com
@Alessandro: Thanks for the words of encouragement and for blogging it! :)
@Greg: I’m starting on the I-Ds now. It might be good if I publish an interim guidance document for ports. I’ll get cracking on that. In the meanwhile, please feel free to contact me directly with questions, etc. The most important thing for ports is that they are 100% compatible with existing clients — so you can change the gateway URL from SWX PHP to SWX Ruby (or rSWX) to SWX .Net, etc. and it will Just Work ™. Also the service classes should be compatible with at the main open source version of Flash Remoting for the given platform (SWX PHP is compatible with AMFPHP and includes it as a library). Among other things, the SWX Service Explorer currently uses AMF to query the classes. Also, it’s good to give developers the option of switching between different gateways if they want to (SWX PHP comes with gateways for SWX, AMF, JSON, and XML-RPC).
@Caroline: I just emailed you.
Congratulations Aral on this landmark release! It’s great how much dedication you have to your projects. I’m sure the community will give you the feedback (through cool projects powered by SWX) that you deserve.
At FITC you mentioned you’d like big sites with API’s to start supporting SWX. How’s that effort coming along?
Congratulations, this looks outstanding. I look forward to playing around with it.
Aral,
What is your email address? (or drop me a quick email to my address)
Greg
Hi Aral!
Congratulations on the official release!
After some time I am really thinking of focussing more on swx than xml ;)
Keep up the good work, man.
Great job!
[...] [...]
Hi, congrats for release! Big bravo! I like Just Work things :) and your ideas about simplicity also, a lot! I’m just curious if you are considering Actionscript 3 version seriously or you are targeting mobile market and leaving as3 for undefined future? Milan
wow~Thanks ~it is very appreciate of you