Topic: Development today?

I was thinking that  I need a very simple widget; it requests a web page once every 5 seconds and displays it.  The server is on my local network and will work with http.

I never programmed in flash BITD so don't know what tools were used.  And, of course, things are different today.  So I don't know where to get started.  Especially since I'm a Linux user (but I could spin up an XP VM if necessary).

So i can see two challenges
1) Actually building the widget
2) Getting the widget onto my chumby

Where do I start?

(Unless such a widget already exists??!)

Re: Development today?

If it's a web page using HTML, the chumby does not display HTML.  Usually for chumby, one creates an HTTP service that supplies XML with the data one wants to display, then the Flash in the widget fetches that data, and does whatever it needs to display it.

As to tooling, it is indeed the case that it's now much more difficult to create Flash widgets, since Adobe has black-holed the entire development suite, and even if you had working licenses for older versions, their license server is also ignoring requests from those versions.

You may be able to find a working version of FlashDevelop out there, which would be enough to make widgets - indeed, the internal chumby developers, at least the ones that ran Windows, used that almost exclusively.

What I've done is maintain a bunch of old laptops, running old operating systems, running old versions of the Flash IDE.   It's a very clunky way to work - these machines are actually unable to do much of anything on the web since so much has changed, so I build the widgets on those machines, and then transfer them to and deploy them on contemporary machines.

Re: Development today?

Well, I can make the website return anything I like; it's just gonna make an mqtt call to retrieve a value and then return it to the caller.  XML or plain text or whatever is easy :-)

Oh dear, flashdevelop.org appears to have rotted away.  The source apparently can be built with visual studio 2019 but, of course, MS no longer distribute that; 2022...    I wonder how much fighting will be needed to be able to build this.

Might almost be easier to switch the chumby over to a more pure Linux solution and code directly to that!!

Re: Development today?

Way back when, I compiled a whole bunch of Open Source Flash development tools for the chumby itself, so you could try to use that to create widgets.

A link to it is at http://wiki.chumby.com/index.php?title=Actionscript at the bottom of the page.

5 (edited by unwiredben 2024-06-25 14:48:02)

Re: Development today?

The last FlashDevelop download can be found at https://www.flashdevelop.org/downloads/ … -5.3.3.exe or https://www.flashdevelop.org/downloads/ … -5.3.3.zip it seems, their forum just went down.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190810223 … =Main_Page seems to have most of the docs still

Re: Development today?

unwiredben wrote:

The last FlashDevelop download can be found at https://www.flashdevelop.org/downloads/ … -5.3.3.exe or https://www.flashdevelop.org/downloads/ … -5.3.3.zip it seems, their forum just went down.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190810223 … =Main_Page seems to have most of the docs still

Thanks, that's very useful!