SWFAddress 2.1

Today is the third day of the 360Flex Europe conference and in about an hour I'm going to give a session about using SWFAddress in Flex 3. This is finally a good reason for a new release which has been postponed a few times since January. Enjoy the brand new SWFAddress 2.1 and send us feedback using the project forums.

The list of changes includes:

• New SWFAddressOptimizer class that encapsulates the JavaScript SEO code and improves the HTML degrading of Flash websites.
• New getPathNames and getBaseURL methods.
• New Rewriteless sample for SEO support without URL rewriting.
• New YouTube Player API sample for video deep linking.
• New SWiSH Max2 sample.
• Tomcat SEO sample ported to Flex.
• Enhanced SEO sample.
• Improved href and popup methods.
• Safari 3 reload and popup blocker fixes.
• Deep links validation for XSS vulnerabilities.
• DOM fix for Firefox.
• The new Google Analytics tracking is supported out of the box.
• Strict mode no longer requires a slash at the end of the value.
• The A2S/AS3 classes are available in the com.asual.swfaddress package.
• Flex 3 compatibility.

The release includes many new improvements and various fixes. Some of you have probably seen the swfaddress-seo.js file which is now replaced with a new SWFAddressOptimizer class which fixes some issues and adds a Flash Player detection so that people without proper version won't get the deep linking redirect. The getPathNames() method can simplify the code in complex situations by providing an array containing all the pseudo folders in deep links like "/path/subpath/subsubpath/". The other new getBaseURL() method was made especially for the SEO enabled samples that now can easily provide "Copy link to clipboard" or "Digg it" type of functionality by exposing addresses without anchors and possibly improving your search engine positioning. The Rewriteless sample is for those of you who want to use the SWFAddress SEO approach, but don't have URL rewriting enabled. The YouTube sample was born a day after Google released the Player JavaScript API and showcases basic deep linking for video. Larry Benedict ported the basic sample to SWiSH Max2 and brought the SWFAddress functionality to a whole new group of developers. I spent some time rewriting the Tomcat sample in Flex 3 using custom SWFAddress powered components. Many people reported that the href/popup functionality fails silently because of the Safari popup blocker and this new release should fix it. Warren from Richmond discovered a nasty XSS vulnerability for Internet Explorer and thanks to him now the deep linking values are filtered for possible bad symbols. Because of the huge interest in the new Google Analytics code it's now supported automatically. Finally the ActionScript classes are distributed with packages which are much more suitable for larger projects. This enhancement happens during the build process and you still can find the classes without packages in the source folder and in many of the samples where simplicity makes sense.

The really good news is that the SWFAddress team is growing little by little. Max Tafelmayer recently joined the project and committed few high quality fixes. Mattew Tretter, who created StateManager will also help us improve SWFAddress with some of his excellent Safari tricks.

With this release we're also starting to reward all the generous donations with nice SWFAddress t-shirts. Check the donation section for more information.