One of my experience sharing notes, below, to my peeps on Flashn00bz. Although SWC’s have been around since November, I’ve only recently started to understand where Flash 8, or a big updated of Flash 7 needs to take us in terms of Shared Libraries and SWC’s. Shared Libraries, even if your only using 1 SWF in the end, enable unit testing of components, and prevent redundancy in assets. If I have a Button component, Shared Libraries of many tiers all reference the same asset vs. SWC’s which compile them internally, and therefore allowing multiple SWC’s to use the same button, but keep their own copy unecessarely. However, Shared Libraries are not as portable as SWC’s, more fragile, and less control on execution order in the case of mixing SWC’s with Shared Libraries as I experienced last week. Either a decoupling of assets in SWC’s needs to happen to ensure they are not being repeated, OR you’ll just have to plan really frikin’ well ahead of time. Additionally, Shared Libraries need, as I talk about below, to get the ability to dynamically change their Shared Asset URL at runtime. It’s amazing, as much as I love both of the above technologies, I can still see tons of room for improvement, in both the IDE and the Player itself.
Anyway, read on…