In the past couple weeks, a lot of attention has been paid to the SWFAddress script written by Rostislav at asual.com. While this is a huge step forward, I wanted let everyone know about another (better and easier) solution to consider using.
My friend Matt Tretter at [URL=http://www.sunkingig.com]sunKING Digital has been working on a StateManager class for Flash for a few months now, and has published an article and a working sample here:
http://exanimo.com/as2/statemanager
Source and sample files:
http://exanimo.com/files/StateManager.zip
Why should you use StateManager as a solution to your Flash back-button and deep-linking needs??
- This is the first method that doesn’t break in Safari when you navigate to a new page.
- Unlike SWFAddress, is clean and Object Oriented (less ActionScript code required).
- Thanks to JSInterface, you can import external JavaScript files directly from Flash.
- While it integrates seamlessly with Geoff Stearn’s SWFObject , it doesn’t require that you use it. In fact, unlike SWFAddress, it degrades gracefully if JavaScript is turned off.
Kudos to Matt for getting this working well. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more and more sites integrating back-button and deep-linking into their functionality, now that there are a few open source tools out there.