[transform-swf-updates] Status report for week ending June 11th

[News on r. b. a. p. f. T. S. f. J. <tra...@li...>]

Progress This Week:

Released an alpha version. This is "work-in-progress" release albeit 
very stable and certainly good enough for developing code with. 
Currently, requested features are being implemented - hence the API 
changes, see below - and once those have been completed the release 
phase will move to beta which is still planned for the end of the month.

API Changes:

Added ShapeTag to support a common interface to all the different shapes 
in Flash: DefineShape, DefineShape2, DefineShape3, DefineShape4, 
DefineMorphShape, DefineMorphShape2. LineStyle was changed to LineStyle1 
with LineStyle changed to an interface to allow ShapeTag to be created. 
The methods on the morph shapes for accessing the starting shape were 
renamed to match the ShapeTag interface.

Added StaticTextTag to provide a common interface for accessing the 
objects that define static text: DefineText, DefineText2.

Code Changes:

Cleaned up most of the magic numbers.

Refactored the constants in SWF (and renamed it to Constants). Most 
values were simply limitations on the file format rather than individual 
constraints on different types of data so the constants were condensed 
into UNSIGNED_SHORT_MAX, SIGNED_SHORT_MIN and SIGNED_SHORT_MAX and moved 
to the Coder class - which now contains constants covering most of the 
magic numbers founds in the library.

Simplified CoderException to remove name attribute. The toString() 
method now returns the location as a hexadecimal number making it easy 
to find hte "offending" tag using Describe SWF.

Decoders reporting unsupported fill styles or filters now report the 
location using the SWFDecoder method mark() which now returns the 
current location.

Testing:

Expanded the suite of real-world Flash files. When performing a  decode 
- encode- re-decode cycle only 5 errors are detected out of 667 files.

Planned For This Week:

More code polishing to get ready for a beta release.

Regards,

Stuart
--
Flagstone Software Ltd.