Following Mike Davies's spirited uncovering of the domain name that The Tangent will be hosted at (http://swxformat.org), here's a roundup of everything that's currently public about the project, including some new bits of information, ahead of next week's official announcement:

• I started it because I'm not happy with any of the existing methods of working with data in Flash. I find them unnecessarily complicated to work with and I believe that this is scaring developers Flash developers (hint) away from building mashups, experimenting and having fun with data-driven applications in Flash. (The other formats have their uses and The Tangent won't replace them for every use case -- and will work alongside them also. You'll be able to use it in a complimentary manner with AMFPHP, for example.)
• My overriding design focus with The Tangent is simplicity. Everything about the project will reflect this, from the web site to how the project itself is deployed and distributed and the documentation and supporting materials. The Tangent is going to be the easiest way of working with data in Flash.
• Next week's release of The Tangent is *very* early alpha - it will creak, it will break, it will throw its toys and generally be a nuisance — but it will nevertheless be very, very cool!
• And a new tid-bit: Initially, PHP will be the only server-side technology that is supported. In further iterations (and with community support), we should see support for other server-side technologies such as Python, Ruby and Java.

I spent some time today making the analyzer component (one piece of The Tangent project) all-beautiful-and-shiny-like. I'm very biased, of course, but I like to think that it's a lovely analyzer, as far as analyzers go (I decided it's not really a debugger and hence the name change). I hope you'll agree when you see it next week.

I will be releasing the web site, full information and the initial alpha over the course of next week. The alpha will be out prior to my talk at the LFPUG on Thursday and you can be sure that I'll be presenting it during the conference tour that I'm going to be embarking on starting in April (May's totally crazy -- something like four conferences, maybe more! More on those later!)

Thank you all for the interest you've shown in this and for your support. It's going to be worth it -- I can't wait to reveal The Tangent and to work with you to develop it into something that's really useful to us all.

Here's to the most amazing community on the planet! Go Flashers! (Yell that in public, I dare you!.. umm, does a blog count?) Love you guys! And I hope you'll love The Tangent!

The The Tangent: Roundup article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.