Yahoo! Flash (R) Blog

Yahoo! Pipes + Flash: Smokin’ Good

You’ve probably heard the buzz about Yahoo! Pipes, a powerful and easy tool for mashing up data from across the Internet. But did you know that Pipes is one of Yahoo!’s Flash-friendly properties? Our buddies at Pipes have generously deployed an open crossdomain policy file, giving all Flash and Flex developers access to the raw Pipes output. Just like with Flickr (see Allen’s post), there are no security worries, no roadblocks, and no limits to what you can do with the Pipes data. Pipes can even be your proxy for grabbing data from places that aren’t themselves accessible using Flash (although some sources may prevent Pipes from accessing their data—you’ll want to make sure a particular data source works with Pipes before using it.)

If you haven’t tried Pipes, definitely check it out. It has an intuitive visual interface that allows you to import and manipulate data from across the web, with zero coding skills necessary! Want to mash up all your favorite RSS feeds into a single super-feed? How about checking Flickr images against recent news articles? Whatever you create, you can export to your preferred format, ready to view in a reader or, as shown below, in your own interface built with Flash or Flex.

Once you create a pipe or try one of the many already available, you are just a couple of steps away from using that data in Flash. In the example below, we are using a simple pipe that aggregates some news feeds. First, let’s run the pipe and choose More Options > Get as RSS.

Notice that the URL you get is of the form http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?somepipe&_render=rss. That’s almost the URL you’ll use to retrieve the XML data, but not quite. For security purposes, most of Yahoo! APIs use *.yahooapis.com as the API entrypoint. So once you replace pipes.yahoo.com with pipes.yahooapis.com in that URL, you’re in business (note that there’s no crossdomain on pipes.yahoo.com, but there is one on pipes.yahooapis.com—that’s what’s working the magic.) Now, if your pipe has any parameters you need to include, just build out the URL as needed and send it along.

Here’s a really simple example in Flex that uses the pipe described above.

Please install Flash 9 to see this example.

Check out the source here.

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Who is who on Flash Platform Team

It occurs to us that though we’ve spent nearly a month in the public eye, we haven’t yet gotten around to introducing ourselves. We figure we should let you know about our backgrounds and specific interests in the vast world of Flash, so here goes: the officially sanctioned bios of the Flash Platform team members. Pictures to come!

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Developing with the Display List in ActionScript 3

If you’re migrating from AS2 to AS3, or you’re just getting started with Flash development, you may be interested in an article I wrote for the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center entitled Developing with the Display List in ActionScript 3. It focuses on the basics of display list manipulation, important changes you may encounter if you’re migrating from ActionScript 2, and best practices for communicating between MovieClips and other DisplayObjects.

As many new developers moving to ActionScript 3 discover, the new language is stricter and many of the shortcuts one may have taken in the past with AS2 will have certain roadblocks that must be crossed in AS3. The article tries to outline the best ways to understand the changes, work around them as needed, and most importantly, how to develop applications and websites in AS3 so that you don’t need to use these workarounds. I included several source code examples, including the progression of a simple application as I try to update it with best practices.

If you’re looking to write more flexible and maintainable AS3 code, or you’d like to help a fellow developer who is struggling with the changes from AS2 to AS3, I hope the article will be helpful.

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