About
BirdBase – the name
The name comes from the origami fold, which is a versatile base from which thousands of different creations are made, most famously the crane and the flapping bird. (Origami Techniques on Wikipedia)
Drop us an email if you have questions: site (at) birdbase dot org.
In a nutshell…
BirdBase is a combination of ActionScript libraries bound together to help you create microsites.
These libraries are:
That’s the core, anyway. We also use a bit of as3corelib from Adobe and the occasional AS3-Signal.
What does it offer?
- Deep-linking support
- Multi-lingual – localization support
- Run-time configuration
- Boot-time asset loading
- On-demand asset loading
- Run-time dynamic asset swapping
- No XML
- Decent documentation (We promise)
Why?
The people behind the code and ideas of BirdBase have worked for many years in digital agencies, big, small, good and bad. There’s a certain level of frustration over fixing the same problems and building the same things over and over, not to mention fixing freelancers’ special code, that has led to this bit of code.
We’ve all worked in marketing, advertising and application development, and BirdBase is targeted towards clients and project managers as much as developers. There are a number of things that clients demand, time and time again.
- Localization – multi-lingual sites with translations all served through a CMS.
- Deep-linking – so that advertising and marketing can directly link straight through to key parts of the site
- Tracking – to measure what’s happening
- Customizing the layout depending on the locale – the configuration can be locale-specific, so layout information can be held in the configuration and modified as required. Or some things might be turned off in one country.
Developers do not need to keep inventing architecture. What is the point, anyway? RobotLegs gives us a solid architecture and it’s light.
XML is also banished. This is a personal preference. From a practical point of view, XML is natively supported by the Flash Player, but it’s just HORRIBLE. It’s not readable, it’s verbose, it’s heavy, and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, it wasn’t designed for data serialization. Yes, it can be done, see Parsley, etc, but it stinks.
So we’re using YAML, which is clean, concise, readable, and designed for data serialization. YAML support in BirdBase is weak, we agree, but we have not hit any limitations yet. Once we (or you) do, maybe we will start extending the third-party library.
