I just finished an ActionScript 2.0 class file meant to be a companion to my JavaScript SCORM API wrapper. It includes a bunch of type checking, type conversion, and error-checking, and works with both SCORM 1.2 and 2004.
Found a small bug when using the wrapper with Flash (AS2): functions that return string values (such as SCORM.data.get()) were coming out ‘undefined’. (grr)
Explicitly typing the return value as a string seems to make Flash happy.
Some small edits to the wrapper:
Fixed a few typos in debug statements
Added extra error-checking during SCORM.connection.initialize; if connection cannot be made AND no error code is given, display notice that server has not responded.
Related links:
Original SCORM API Wrapper journal entry
pipwerks.com SCORM page
I’ve been a longtime user of the ADL wrapper (with code from the late Claude Ostyn), and to be honest, it’s pretty much met my needs. But I was never completely comfortable with the wrapper for two reasons: 1) The code is hard to read with confusing and overly complicated looking variable names, and 2) the code made heavy use of global variables, which in this Web 2.0 world is a big no-no. This past week I decided to roll up my sleeves and make a new SCORM API wrapper that takes care of these issues.
I just got Captivate 3, and eagerly installed it to see if any improvements have been made regarding JavaScript and Actionscript handling. Short answer: nope.
For the last week, I’ve been doggedly attempting to create a hybrid of Flash-to-JavaScript communication techniques for creating cross-browser SCORM-conformant courses that work with almost any version of Flash Player. Today I threw in the towel. Here’s my story.
While working on a project earlier today, I discovered a nasty little problem… Internet Explorer v7 (IE7) disables prompt() by default! This means you can’t rely on prompt() being available in IE7 when building your online applications. I decided to make a workaround using Microsoft’s proprietary showModalDialog function.
I decided to create a guide for the examples, which gives a little bit of background for each example as well as the URL for each example. http://www.pipwerks.com/lab/swfobject/
Captivate SWFs can communicate with the host HTML file via JavaScript, but the scripting options suffer from severe limitations imposed by the Captivate authoring environment.
Everyone knows the story: an innocent email address is posted online and a big bad spambot finds it, relaying it to every spammer on the face of the earth… the email address becomes useless due to the 500 spam emails you get every day!