App integration - anyone done this?

[Marielle Lange]

> Does anyone have much experience with integrating RR with other  
> major applications,
> such as Flash/Actionscript or Javascript/HTML/XML?

> While it seems that external functions can be called, it looks like  
> use of these other apps
> would require containing it within a subset of the view area, like  
> it is a distinct media element,
> or am I mistaken?

As Henk mentions,

This can be done, thanks to altBrowser.

Concrete example, you can write a wiki that works on your desktop,  
without the need for any browser.
<http://projects.widged.com/portal/wikipad.php>

All top buttons are on the application side (revolution objects and  
scripts).
The display area (starting at "welcome") is a browser window.
This allows for richer text editing.
Pages can be edited.

Unfortunately, a limit of this approach is that the full page needs  
to be edited. Parts of the page cannot be accessed. There could be  
changed using javascript but then the problem is change the  
javascript (a browser side technology) from within revolution.

Some route to explore to bypass this problem is this "ajax pages"  
library:
http://ajax-pages.sourceforge.net/

Though they use the name of ajax, which is for remote scripting, this  
is in fact a templating engine for javascript. That let gives you  
functionalites very similar to php except that it works without any  
server-side setup.

This opens the possibility to have editable fields within a window,  
which can then be displayed with html+css which offer richer  
formatting than revolution.

I haven't tried out. But it's worth exploring. If this works, then  
you may also be able manipulate flash movies using AFLAX technologies  
(http://www.aflax.org/). I haven't evaluated that any closely, I only  
point to technologies you may want to check out,

Another thing to keep an eye on is Andre Garzia website. According to  
this  <http://www.revdeveloper.com/include/blog/kevin/?p=3> he is  
working on something that could provide a "Zero to instant web  
framework". Andre's website is: <http://www.andregarzia.com/>

Marielle
------------------------------------------------
Marielle Lange (PhD),  http://widged.com
Bite-size Applications for Education