FABridgeC

FABridgeC is a Closure Compiler compatible version of Adobe's Flex Ajax Bridge JavaScript code, also known as FABridge.

It's still a bit of a work in progress, but it should be usable as a drop-in replacement for FABridge in nearly all cases (see below for details). FABridgeC is available under the terms of the MIT license, just like the original FABridge JavaScript.

The upshot? An FABridge replacement that's just 5.4 KiB compiled, or 2.0 KiB gzipped.

Drop-in Replacement

You can use the compiled fabridgec.js in place of fabridge.js pretty much anywhere. Go ahead and try it out on your website, and save 10+ KiB every fresh page load. Unless you're really into optimizing things, that's all it takes.

The two cases in which it won't work:

1. If you use the low-level API of FABridge: (These functions aren't exported by default, but you can export them manually if you want.)
   • getPropertyFromAS(objRef, propName)
   • setPropertyInAS(objRef,propName, value)
   • callASFunction(funcID, args)
   • callASMethod(objID, funcName, args)
2. If you have Flash objects with bridge names of a single character. (They may conflict with the Closure-generated internal method names.)

It should work in pretty much every other case. FABridgeC doesn't pollute the global namespace.

If you want to recompile FABridgeC, the compile.sh script with FABridgeC uses Plovr to ease running the Closure Compiler. Running the compiler manually should work as well, just don't forget to include externs/fabridge.js. The provided compilation script also processes the output JavaScript file with gzip and AdvanceCOMP to squeeze the last few bytes out of the file. If you can't serve pre-compressed files, don't worry about fabridgec.js.gz, as the default zlib settings produce a file which is only a few bytes larger than the provided version. (You are compressing your scripts at least, right?)

Use with Closure

If you use the Closure Compiler for your own code, you can use goog.require('vendor.FABridgeC') to include FABridgeC. Use vendor.FABridgeC in place of FABridge in your code, and everything should work as expected.

Note that no FABridge object will be exported to the global namespace, so use goog.require('vendor.FABridgeC.exports') if you want FABridge to be exported in addition to using it in your code.

The code in FABridgeC is currently based extremely heavily on the code provided by Adobe in the FABridge JavaScript file, and although a few changes have been made to the formatting, the vast majority has stayed the same. Therefore, much of the code is not in the Google JavaScript style.

Contact

If you have questions or notice a problem, feel free to send me a message via GitHub (I'm aschmitz), or find me on my website and say hello.