"Coordinate Your Flash Site"
Flash websites load more quickly when they are broken into smaller movies (i.e., “modularized”). While the idea seems obvious enough, it’s still worth mentioning, and good explanations are always worthwhile! What’s less obvious is that, once you’ve started along that road, issues of “coordination” take precedent; and, whether the developer is a seasoned professional or a relative newbie (like me), they’d do well to recognize these issues up front.
That said, this article hopes to accomplish three things: first, to underscore the value of modularization. Second, to clarify some of its important, though previously underreported, repercussions. Finally, to offer remedy to these repercussions by explaining how the task of “coordination” can be accomplished systematically.
References are here made to a few websites I’ve designed for others and to a bulleted check list of questions that Flash developers (particularly those hoping to decrease load times) should consider before they break up their websites into little bitty pieces.
Modularization case study:
I had previously broken up a few sections of one of my favorite websites into smaller swf’s and loaded them into different levels of the main movie. In fact, it seemed pretty natural for things like MP3/ music selectors, clocks, and such. And, quiet as it’s kept, I’d grown accustomed to the inordinate size that my main movie had taken. So, when I came across a recent SitePoint article on modularizing the main movie (otherwise known as placing it on a diet; see
Angeletti), I studied it with great interest.
And indeed, it worked! In fact, it worked so seamlessly, I went through the entire website and dismantled/ modularized 6-8 additional sections! Great, I thought! Now, the main movie was much smaller in size – at least after deleting all remaining unused items from its library. With that, I noticed it took less time to load and that I could more easily isolate any remaining areas of concern. Unexpectedly, by breaking up the main movie into smaller pieces, it became easier to identify those sections of the website that could be re-used!
For instance, when my favorite website initially loads, a set of doors open, revealing an image centered on the screen, sitting right above four main navigational buttons. Before modularization, this “door-opening routine” would occur only once – when the website was initially loaded. So, this was the first thing I modularized. After doing so, it became obvious to me that I could re-use or “coordinate” the door-opening routine to execute every time my users would click one of the main navigation buttons! All I had to do was call the door-opening routine from inside each one of the buttons. Simple!
What I had not yet realized was that the task of coordination would eventually become anything but simple. Try coordinating anywhere from 25-50 different sub-movies so that they interact as users expect both with the main movie and with one another! Let me tell you, it can get a little unwieldy!
Just how unwieldy?
Well, let me just say that, despite its obvious benefits, modularization raises important questions of coordination (which, in turn, raise questions of time and effort – e.g., how much time do you have and how much effort are you willing to expend). However, the first question asks: “how much modularization is enough, and how much is too much”? Is there a point of optimality? These and other related questions are addressed in the
full article.
This article was published in its entirety, in November, 2002 by SitePoint.com.
Author: Steven A. Maclin, Ph. D.
About the Author: Dr. Maclin has been a university professor since 1994, but from 1998 - 2004, he lived and worked with American military troops in Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea. He has previously edited and published dozens of articles in professional administrative journals and recently, in his ‘spare time,’ he’s been building Flash Websites for distributing materials to his graduate students. Hes now stateside, teaching graduate students online, writing articles and developing a small online business (see
http://loan-money-usa.com); he can be reached at info@loan-money-usa.com.