Roughly about 6 months ago, my then colleague Arul blogged about Gaia, and that marked the changes in me ever since. 😀
Authored by Steven Sacks, “Gaia is a front-end Flash Framework designed to dramatically reduce development time”. What I love about it is that it provides common solutions to repeated tasks that we, as front-end developers, have to face in almost every project, such as:
- Navigation
- Transitions
- Preloading
- Asset management
- Site structure
- Deep linking
From my own experiences of using it in a recent project, Gaia has indeed proven itself in the following areas:
- The Scaffolding engine creates a click through version of my site in less than 10 minutes! I was able to have a basic run through thereafter with my designer and setting things right the first time saves us a huge amount of time changing later on.
- I used to hear about swfobject and the goodness of deep linking that swfaddress brings, but I never had an idea of how to implement them. With Gaia, they’re already done for me! No pain, all gain! 😛
- I am able to do things the way I like, without restricting my coding style by the way Gaia is implemented. This is absolutely a plus, because I don’t have to conform to it, and it still works!
These are just some of the key points actually. The extent of the convenience and time that I saved allowed me to even blog about this right now. 😀 To fully understand it’s capabilities, there’s no other better way than to use it in your next project. 😉
You can download the latest framework here, find the documentation here, and if happen to have a few minutes to spare, watch how you can build your very first Gaia project here!
VERY IMPORTANT NOTE:
The long awaited AS3 Gaia Framework is nearly upon us! Find out how to participate in the beta release on January 22nd! *w00t*
