Last week we wanted to see if we could speed up the loading of the Floorplanner Flash app. The Flash app (AS2) consists of 1 main app that loads several swf forms (the windows you see, like the library). The library itself holds a lot of furniture elements, which are separate swf files that are loaded one by one.
When a user creates a floor plan and adds furniture to it, it’s not strange that the design holds more than 50 furniture elements. Though all elements are small swf files, it takes a lot of time to handle all resource requests on our server. We thought it would be nice if we didn’t have to load all the elements one by one, but that we could bundle them into one big swf file. Then the generated bundle-swf is loaded into the flash app and the furniture elements are loaded from the bundle-swf.
We looked at Swfmill and Ming, and we did manage to create a setup that could dynamically bundle the furniture elements into one big swf. The problem was that it didn’t work for all our furniture elements. Almost 10% failed.
In the Flash app we also experienced some unexpected issues. You can only add mc’s (furniture elements) from the library to the stage by using attachMovie(). That means that all elements must have the same parent mc (AS2). So you can only use one bundle-swf, because if you load another, your attached mc’s will be removed.
With all the issues we encountered we decided to keep things as they are right now, and tackle this issue when we’re upgrading to AS3.
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