back to the roots

I meant to blog about this for a while, but I guess I’m not that bloggy. Anyway, I’m still hacking Swfdec. I didn’t write a blog post for the recent Swfdec 0.6.2 release nor for the swfdec-gnome releases I do all the time to go with Gnome releases. I didn’t even write a proper blog post for Swfdec 0.6.0, and that was a major release.

But still, stuff happened. All distros I know about have the 0.6 version of Swfdec in their repositories now – and that even includes Ubuntu, thanks to Adam Caldwell – you rock, dude! But the most important thing I guess is that due to the awesome work of Brian Pepple Swfdec will be included in the default install of Fedora 9. So if you want Swfdec working on a Live-CD you know where to look.

We’ve also been adding features to Swfdec’s unstable branch. The most user-visible feature is editing support for text entries. So you can actually enter text now! I also made the script engine twice as fast by accident. But the most interesting feature for me is a feature I intend to use for debugging Swfdec: the addition of a “script translation engine”. What does it do? It translates an absract syntax tree from/to the byte codes inside the flash file or Actionscript code. This means we have a compiler and a decompiler for Flash now. And that in turn should help debugging Swfdec internals tremendously. Expect a 0.7.2 release with all these goodies soon.

The down side to all of this is that my GVfs hacking has suffered (read: gone nonexistent). I intend to do some hack weeks on GVfs to get some more features included and bugs fixed and of course I read GVfs bugmail, but I guess that’s about it for a while.