flIRC – First Steps in Flash 8.5 and Flex

THIS IS OUT OF DATE. CHECK THE NEWER VERSION HERE

flIRCI started working on my Flash IRC Client (flIRC) some time before Flash 8.5 was released. Now two days later I want to show you the first demo of my little project and experiment. You can see a very early version here.

Ther is still a lot of work to do but you can already join channels and talk. Private messages to other users are not supported yet like a lot of events like JOIN/PART/KICK/MODE etc. Please remember Flash 8.5 is now only two days old and I never used this Flex stuff before.

The application:
I am using Flex2. This is not an AS3 only project so I have got my code in theese mxml files which is a little bit confusing at the beginning but you will like it because you can be very fast. I do not care about application states, I do not care about initializing components and all this stuff. It is very easy to use. Even the alignment of the elements can be done by Flex.

Connection:
As I wrote one day ago there is a problem with the security model of Flash. The workaround is quiet simple and has nothing to do with Flash directly. I installed a proxy on my shell and just forward every connection to irc.quakenet.org. The only problem is that the connections are not client-side only.

Macromedia should handle a socket request like using the camera. A simple dialog box would make life easier.

Other problems:
The TextArea seems to be very buggy. I wont blame Macromedia for this because it is only an Alpha. But one problem is very annoying. If you use htmlText and add a lot of text very fast (while-loop for example) then the TextArea won’t display all the text you appended to it.
The workaround is using a simple flash.util.Timer and an Array where all messages get stored. On every tick one message gets added.

Most IRC clients do not support UTF-8 encoding. The socket got a writeUTFBytes() function but all the special german characters look wrong on other clients. The solution here was using a simple byte array which gets filled by a string. Most of the communication is now located in an own class called IRCSocket.

Using textarea.vPosition = textarea.maxVPosition; worked for me in Flash 8. This does not seem to work in 8.5 so currently the text wont scroll.

Links:

THIS IS OUT OF DATE. CHECK THE NEWER VERSION HERE

This entry was written by joa, posted on Oct 19, 2005 at 7:04 pm, filed under de.je2050.*, experiments, Flash, news, personal, projects, workarounds. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

9 Comments

  1. cy
    Posted Oct 19, 2005 at 11:27 pm | Permalink

    What kind of Addon is the bar in your browser?

  2. joa
    Posted Oct 20, 2005 at 8:12 am | Permalink

    It is the WebDeveloper toolbar.

  3. Campbell
    Posted Oct 28, 2005 at 10:26 am | Permalink

    Cool dude well done

  4. nullsystems
    Posted Dec 15, 2005 at 2:27 pm | Permalink

    Im interested in creating a FLASH IRC Client, there are plenty out there, but many work on their OWN servers which must be downloadeded to us the socket, could you explain very quickly how to get a flash irc client to connect to a server and send/recieve data? or even help me on my way ?

  5. Louis
    Posted Jan 27, 2006 at 5:54 pm | Permalink

    Hi
    we are looking for a flash irc client like this.
    Is it possible to buy it or buy the code?

    thanks

  6. joa
    Posted Jan 27, 2006 at 8:57 pm | Permalink

    The 8.5 player is still not released and the Flex2 Builder Alpha is for testing purposes only.

    I could think about creating such an application when AS3 is finally released.

  7. flexNOOB
    Posted Mar 9, 2006 at 5:28 am | Permalink

    oh god you are so cool !!!
    how did u make that !

  8. Neo
    Posted Jan 24, 2008 at 3:32 am | Permalink

    Pls reupload

  9. Felix
    Posted Nov 4, 2008 at 12:19 am | Permalink

    have source?

7 Trackbacks

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    [...] some kind of request it might be some time to explain detailed how I used the Socket in my IRC client. First of all I will explain how to bypass the securitymodel. I wrote about this before bu [...]

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    [...] =”_blank”> Handle Socket-Data depending on CRLF (source) Security model and Flash 8.5 flashIRC – First Steps in Flash 8.5 and Flex (example) AS3 oldschool fire (source + example) AS3 o [...]

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    ActionScript 3.0 站点集合

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  5. By Yet Another Blog from Luar » Collection of AS3 Socket Examples on Jan 11, 2006 at 7:42 am

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  6. By blog.je2050.de - blog and database of joa ebert » flIRC - next version with Flex2 Beta 1 on Feb 15, 2006 at 7:47 pm

    [...] a demo version. Not all features of the IRC protocol may work properly. Links: flIRC Old post about flIRC

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    Please won’t you leave a commen [...]

  7. By DeCabeza.net » Colección de link útiles sobre ActionScript 3 - desarrollo web, tutoriales, video tutoriales, videotutoriales, flash, photoshop, php, mysql, dreamweaver on Jun 27, 2008 at 4:28 pm

    [...] IRC [...]

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