Use the inline feature with care. Apparat does not try to optimize your code and performs nothing but dead simple inlining. This can lead to slower code due to the creation of lots of local registers. Your code gets also much bigger and will require more space in memory. I am actually not a fan of manual inlining at all. I think it makes only sense to inline code if you have a powerful optimizer available that will cleanup the whole mess.

The fun story about this example is that the inlined version is slower using the lastes Flash Player release candidate if you have only 40.000 particles. That is why I increased the number of particles to 80.000 ;). I developed the example using an old standalone player and the inlined version was nearly twice as fast. However when I watched the example in the browser with the latest release candidate the game was completely different. Kudos to Adobe for significantly improving the Flash Player performance!

• AS3-only Version
• Inline Version
• Source

So if you want to have quick and dirty inlining capabilities: this is for you. It is an easy fix for a feature a lot of people have asked for. I will continue working on TAAS to implement this much better in the future.

However when deploying you can spend some extra time compressing your SWF files with the best tools available. 7-Zip is for instance such a tool and achieves a great compression ratio.

If you have the 7z executable on your PATH Apparat will make use of it to achieve the best compression for your SWF files. More configuration options are available here.

This feature is currently only implemented for SWF files and not SWCs. However every tool will make use of it by default. So if you are running Reducer and have no graphics in your SWF files you can still get a better compression.

An example is straight from the sources:

reducer -i as3\Apparat.Tests.AS3\bin\Test07.swf
[i] Apparat -- http://apparat.googlecode.com/
[i] Launching tool: Reducer
[i] Waiting for 7z ...
[i] Compression ratio: 18.224573%
[i] Total bytes: 310
[i] Completed in 547ms.

Note please that this SWF file does not contain any graphical assets and we got still a ratio of 18%. Our main audiotool.swf file is compressed by about 10% — about 200kb — and contains no graphical assets either.

You can download the latest Apparat on Google Code. Please note that you will need Scala 2.8 RC1 as well.

However the current version is named Firestarter for a reason. What you see online is just the tip of the iceberg. I can not wait to start implementing all the cool features that will separate us from traditional software ;)

Now if you add one and one together you see that the TAAS compiler can be used as a very strong decompiler. My own tests have shown that it will work flawlessly where other commercial decompilers output rubbish. Since the compiler behaves like the Flash Player it will “execute” the bytecode in order to parse it which means it has a very highlevel understanding of the structure inside the SWF.

The only question is now what to do with the source code. I wrote the decompiler for my session at FOTB to show much easier how the optimizations behave. It is also a great tool to debug errors. But should it be opened or not?

To take it one step further one might also be able to write an obfuscator using the TAAS compiler. In my opinion it would be cool to have a strong decompiler and obfuscator, both being open source. We might also add an option to protect SWFs from the decompiler by adding something to the SWF metadata for instance. Of course this is just a simple rule which could be removed by someone once the code is open. What do you think?

The recording of the jam session is also available. I just want to note that I used the processing library inside Eclipse for the speedcoding. This time I also practiced at home unlike for other jam sessions. The visualizer was an homage to a table designed by Daft Punk for habitat.

Before FOTB I was not sure if I can present Apparat at all. For me as an autodidact it is not always easy to solve certain issues. Mario Klingemann talked about Magic Moments in Brighton. I guess I had one after a long time of thinking and failing. I got really into the flow and everything became so clear. Stay tuned for more detailed posts on the technique behind the different compilers.

However this was a really special conference for me. The standing ovations made me completely happy and I was absolutely overwhelmed by the response. After all those sleepless nights it was a huge gift of appreciation for my work. I will definitely never forget that moment and all I can say is thank you. If you spend so much time working on an opensource project this is really the best that can happen. “Leaving the Sandbox” came from a long background. The end of the session was a really emotional for me. Thank you John for inviting me.

Hopefully I will meet a lot of interesting people and Flash Player engineers. It will be my first MAX so I am really curious.

Dump has now another cool feature: UML diagram generation. The UML diagram is exported in DOT format. I think this is a really cool feature because the graph is built by analyzing a SWF file and you get it for free. I will probably create a different tool to make full use of the UML generation since you could link multiple files together for a complete coverage. Since Graphviz is not able to underline text I have choosen to use a dollar sign for static methods. You will also get proper parameter names if you compile your SWF file in debug mode.

This is an example UML diagram for the playerglobal.swc. In order to create it I took the playerglobal.abc from the Tamarin sources and the command was java -jar dump.jar -input playerglobal.abc -uml.

Here are two example representations but be careful. The PNG size is 30831×6232 and might crash your browser. Chrome can display the PNG for me but is not able to show the SVG correct. Firefox displays the SVG very well. You can download the PNG and open it in IrfanView or Photoshop to be safe.

• PNG
• SVG

You will need a program like Graphviz to visualize the exported DOT file. If you want to export the inheritance graph you basically writejava -jar dump.jar -input file.swf -ig. I think this shows a really cool feature of Apparat. It is also very easy to reverse engineer a UML diagram. I am not interested in such a feature but maybe someone else.

Update: Here is a full-size example for the inheritance graph of the unfinished ImageProcessing library I am currently working on.

I know that there are a lot of other tools out there. swfdump and abcdump are great already. I have used swfdump from the Flex SDK before. But I dislike how they represent namespaces and the fact that not all properties are always shown. Dump is simple. It lists everything and uses the naming form the avm2overview.pdf.

• Download

Apparat is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Please contact me if you want to contribute to this project. Maybe someone is interested in writing an Ant task for Reducer? I am also happy to receive feedback if you have used the framework to build something cool with it.

• Apparat at GoogleCode

Please join the Apparat Discussion Group if you are interested in collaboration.

Now with Reducer you are safe to use [Embed] and then run the tool afterwards. It will compress all lossless images and make them lossy. But usually a PNG can be compressed at 100% JPEG quality and you will still safe a lot of data.

Note: You will not loose alpha transparency when using Reducer. The SWF file format allows us to use a special compression where a PNG gets split up into its color and alpha channels. The color channels are encoded using the traditional JPEG algorithm with adjustable quality while the alpha channel is handled seperately. Transparency is always stored in a lossless fashion which means even with a low JPEG quality you will not get any compression artifacts for the alpha channel.

• Download

Update: Reducer is now open source!

You can see in the screenshot that AS3V places markers in your Eclipse code. It works as an incremental project builder which means it is pretty fast since it only evaluates all your sources that have changed independently. If you have any suggestions for possible rules, please tell me. The Flex SDK coding conventions could be interesting for instance. Right now the Eclipse plug-in has still some problems but I think that a first version might be released in the next few weeks.

We have currently the UIEvent framework including full source code online. I can think of a lot of other frameworks we could release in the near future. Including for instance our DOM, Pogo, Tween or Graph framework. I really hope that we get the go for all those other libraries in the next few days as well.

• http://opensource.hobnox.com/