What if you could create a dynamic Flash website without compiling, and without writing a lick of ActionScript?

And what if I told you that this site was fully standards-compliant, readable and indexable by search engines?

And what if this magic SWF-creator was completely open-source and available now?

Well, believe it my friends — Wrapper is here!

My friend and fellow FlashCodersNY member, Tyler Larson, has finally released his baby into the world, and has graciously decided to make it open-source. He presented to FCNY last night, explaining both the implementation and some of the inner workings, and showing some amazing examples.

An ActionScript 3 HTML/CSS rendering engine, Wrapper makes it simple to create attractive, functional, full-Flash websites using just standard HTML/CSS markup. Now, this may be hard to ‘wrap’ your head around at first, as it was for me, but once you see it in action, you begin to understand the power it gives you, and why Tyler’s been tirelessly working on it for lo these many months.

To see it in action, go to Tyler’s site: http://www.motionandcolor.com/
This site is constructed using Wrapper. Looks like a normal, slick site, right? Remarkably, the whole thing is a SWF, which was constructed using HTML/CSS (view the source).

Very basically, this is how it works: When this page is loaded into the browser, a javascript file, wrapper.js, is loaded. This file “eats” your HTML/CSS and renders all of your content into a SWF, which (using the standard SWFObject method) replaces the HTML and fills the browser window. All this happens instantaneously, as Wrapper is nicely optimized at a lean, mean 22k.

Some of the major benefits of Wrapper include:

  • Dynamic loading of custom fonts, by importing a SWF with that font embedded
  • Bitmap fills (and notice the nice smooth gradient background on the sample link above)
  • Filters (shadows, glows, etc.)
  • Draw shapes (basic primitives such as circles, squares, rounded rectangles, etc.)
  • Standards-compliant
  • Content can be indexed by search engines
  • Can set up and call custom methods for more advanced interaction and functionality
  • Open-source and free
  • And much more, once you get under the hood…

So, if you’re interested in streamlining the development of Flash-based websites and want to produce Flash sites that are fully indexable and standards-compliant, check out Wrapper at Google Code:
http://code.google.com/p/htmlwrapper/

or at OSFlash

http://osflash.org/projects/wrapper

p.s. There’s even a simple WordPress Theme example. Amazing stuff, Tyler, you rock!