I think as a proof of concept I will take my existing and still under development AS2 website and give it the good ‘ol Gaia treatment. I’ll be sure to post what I find either here, and or on the Gaia forums.

Thanks again Steven, you’re commitment to the Framework and to those having issues is un-freaking-believable :-)

It has a robust asset management system.
It has complete integration with SWFAddress through one method (goto).
It has an event based system that you can tap into for custom behavior.
It has a built-in multi-preloader with events, and you can have two different preloaders (one for pages one for assets) and they can be overridden at run-time as many times as you like.

There are a lot of great things in Gaia besides the transition engine. If you think it’s worth the effort to code your own sites that don’t have page transition methodology but have the above functionality, that’s cool.

I use Gaia on any site that has multiple states and needs deeplinking, even if it’s only one page (like Purus) because Gaia just makes it easy to do that stuff. I don’t use Gaia generally on single page sites with out multiple states unless I’m doing a lot of asset management, or I’ll rip out the assets package and use it separately from Gaia (which is actually pretty easy to do).

The initial things I mentioned in this post aren’t part of what I perceive to be the standard way Gaia is setup. Yes it can be made to operate in any way you can think of (just about) but you end up having to jump through more hoops some times than you would if you just coded it by hand. So I’m trying to illustrate what Gaia is good for, and perhaps what it’s not so good for.

The ApplicationDomain took me about 14 hours to get sorted, so when you released version 2.2.3 and it instantly fixed the issue I was having (yes I was already using domain=current in the site.xml) I was very hesitant to upgrade from that point on. That’s one of many issues I experienced, and you’re right I didn’t post them all in the forum as I simply didn’t have enough time. I’ll endeavour to go back over my notes and post some more on the Gaia forums in the forth coming days and weeks.

Using assets as pages is possible - but it kinda defeats the purpose of using the framework somewhat? It can be done, but at first glance (especially for someone new to both AS3 and Gaia) it looks like more work than just writing something from scratch that will do what you want. These aren’t criticisms of the Framework (you’ve done and continue to do a phenomenal job with it) but simply a heads up for those that don’t know much about it and happen to stumble upon this post.

As for Mr Hargrove’s comments, at what stage did this deteriorate into a pissing contest…? Last time I checked this is my blog, and if I choose to illuminate passers by to my trials and tribulations using a certain framework I bloody well will. I really can’t understand why you’ve got so up in arms about what I’ve posted.

Good day indeed (these sign offs are all very British, which for an Aussie is kinda amusing ;-)

1. An issue with dynamic externalized assets not calling init when added to pages that were already loaded (which I fixed promptly after you posted it).

2. How to access an asset type (which I answered).

3. Reloading an asset (which I offered a solution for).

None of those three items were listed in your blog post. Your blog post is about issues which you never mentioned on the forum, all of which have answers and solutions. I could have helped you with all of them if you gave me the opportunity. I’m happy to help. :)

@Wade Arnold - Yes, I am aware of the issues with multiple MXPs, keeping track of old versions, etc. and in the new Gaia panel (currently in development), there will be a great solution for this. One question, though, if you just need to make a small change to an otherwise working site, why bother updating it to the latest version?

@Jason - You can use assets instead of pages and still get SWFAddress history by leveraging deeplinks. I discuss how to do this in the Wiki lesson Leveraging Deeplinks and SWFAddress.

Check out the Purus Vodka site. If you look at the site.xml, you’ll see all the “pages” are assets, and there’s SWFAddress history and transitions between sections, and you’ll also notice that the “forest” asset doesn’t load until you navigate to it by setting the asset preload=”false” and listening for its complete event before transitioning to it. The amount of code this takes is very little and I get all the SWFAddress history I need. :)

If you want to share fonts via a swf that is always there, you could make that swf an asset of a page that didn’t transition out (such as index), and set its depth to “top” (so it is always above middle pages), and have it listen to the onDeeplink event, check the current branch, and adjust its content accordingly. The exact implementation would be up to you, but it’s possible to do it this way. I’m not sure I would do this since I think you can put fonts in shared libraries. It’s been awhile so I don’t recall how you do this, but the information is out there (google).

ApplicationDomain is tricky, and even the author of the class says it’s confusing sometimes. However, the only thing I changed about it was which setting was the default setting. You could still explicitly set it in the site.xml. If “current” worked for you, then set it to “current” and it wouldn’t matter what the default was. :)

At any rate, I’d like to retire this discussion here and invite everyone to bring it to the forums since the topics covered here may be on other developer’s minds and we all might end up repeating ourselves.

My whole point was, you decided to present a problem instead of propose a solution.

Good day, Sir.

FYI I did post my issues in the Gaia forum. Now I’m posting them here. I’m not sure I see a problem with that…? Though it does seem to be irking you a bit.

Gaia definitely has a learning curve, depending on how complex you intend your site to be. However, for the most part it has been a pretty smooth process.

I just don’t see the value in looking at it in the way you are. Because there are solutions to every issue you stated with it - and I know that from personal experience of running into those same issues myself. What’s stopping you from posting these issues in the Gaia forum and possibly proposing some better practices to this *Open Source* project?

It’s just how you deal with those problems that matters.

My $0.02

Have you used the framework for a commercial project? The obstacles I encountered (please outline where I was “bashing”?) were often done so at 3, 4 and 5am in the morning with a looming deadline for an important project. If my post sounded harsh to you, it was because the issues were experienced in that context.

I really enjoy the philosophy behind gaia framework to the point that we disbanded our own development efforts of something similar in order to use gaia. We will continue to use gaia and do what we can to help steven through documentation or financial assistance.