Late last week we released the yourminis widget API (wAPI), an Actionscript 3.0 Library that allows flash content owners to quickly and easily create engaging widgets that run on both the web and desktop.  We developed the wAPI from the ground up with information collected from our development community to improve the development and overall widget experience.  Some of the additional benefits include:

• Simple Widget Publishing – The latest API allows content owners to publish their existing Actionscript 3.0 widgets/apps and take advantage of a majority of the syndication and reporting features with absolutely no code changes.  Our previous release required that users download our SDK and make code changes before publishing to yourminis.

• Online API Reference – Our latest wAPI Reference is now available online from our developer at http://www.yourminis.com/developers/docs/as3/index.html .  The wAPI Reference docs outline all the packages, classes, methods, events, and properties of the object-oriented, actionscript 3.0 widget API library.  The docs are generated from our wAPI source and include sample code snippets throughtout.  Additionally, the online tutorials reference the docs with links directly to the API being referenced making learning the yourminis widget API that much easier.

• Dynamic API Binding – All widgets developed using the yourminis wAPI Actionscript 3.0 library no longer statically link to the API classes.  This provides the ability to develop on the wAPI without any downloads, using any text/actionscript editor, on any platform.  We do encourage users to download our SDK which includes an .mxp Flash CSE Extension specifically built to make the widget development process easier.

• Event Listeners – The wAPI leverages Actionscript 3.0 EventListener class to dispatchEvents to listening objects.  This allows developers to write more advanced widgets that may have multiple listeners and a complex object hierarchy than was previously possible with the previous yourminis Actionscript 2 widget API.

• Object-Oriented Improvements – We have further broken the main widget functions into separate classes.  This helps make the code easier to understand and to write.  As well, classes such as the HTTPLoader and RSSLoader extend and incorporate existing flash classes and methods making it easier to transition from existing code.  For example, calling widget.navigateToURL instead of flash’s navigateToURL will add both URL click tracking to your widget and myspace click support.  If you have code that handles RSSParsing based on a URLLoader, you can use the same code while utilizing the RSSLoader in place of the URLLoader (RSSLoader extends URLLoader)

In addition to the aforementioned widget benefits, developers get all of the innate advantages of using Actionscript 3.0 including (for an overview, check out http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/actionscript3_overview.html)

• Faster processing - “ActionScript 3.0 introduces a new highly optimized ActionScript Virtual Machine, AVM2, which dramatically exceeds the performance possible with AVM1. As a result, ActionScript 3.0 code executes up to 10 times faster than legacy ActionScript code.”

• ECMAScript for XML (E4X) – “E4X offers a natural, fluent set of language constructs for manipulating XML. Unlike traditional XML parsing APIs, E4X makes XML feel like a native data type of the language. E4X streamlines the development of applications that manipulate XML by drastically reducing the amount of code needed.”

• Regular Expressions – “ActionScript 3.0 includes native support for regular expressions so you can quickly search for and manipulate strings. ActionScript 3.0 implements the regular expressions defined in the ECMAScript Language Specification (ECMA-262).”

• Type safety – “In ActionScript 2.0, type annotations were primarily an aid for developers; at runtime, all values were dynamically typed.  In ActionScript 3.0, type information is preserved at runtime and utilized for a number of purposes. Flash Player performs runtime type checking, improving the system's type safety. Type information is also used to represent variables in native machine representations, improving performance and reducing memory usage.”

• Run-time exceptions – “In ActionScript 2.0, many runtime errors would fail in a graceful but silent fashion. This ensured that Flash Player would not display some inexplicable dialog box, which JavaScript did in early web browsers. On the other hand, this lack of error reporting made it more challenging to debug ActionScript programs.   ActionScript 3.0 introduces a variety of runtime exceptions for common error conditions, improving the debugging experience and enabling applications that handle errors robustly. Runtime errors can provide stack traces annotated with source file and line number information, helping to pinpoint errors quickly.”

Last but not least, widgets within the yourminis platform continue to take advantage of benefits including:

• Automatic Copying - of your widget to the top startpages, blogging platforms, social networks, and desktop widget platforms, along with inline email sharing

• Tracking - of views, time spent, users, geolocation, interactions, URL clicks, copies, and custom actions for your widget with detailed reporting.

• HTTP/RSS - Proxying, caching, authorization, conversion of RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, ATOM 0.3, and ATOM 1.0 to RSS 2.0 of 3rd party data feeds (without the need for crossdomain.xml)

• Management Dashboard - for updating content, widget configurations, blacklisting, syndication destinations, and 3rd party gallery publishing

• Global caching network  - for faster widget downloads...

Look for added enhancements to our platform over the coming weeks....