Football in a Flash (Lite)

2006-09-13T14:18:06+03:00

I thought I would share our experience of a recently completed project where we were looking into development using Flashlite. We recreated a favourite application mfooty that we first developed about four years ago that provides a live football results service (goals, cards, etc) to your phone over GPRS. We have developed it in Symbian, J2ME and BREW in the past as a technology comparison, so trying it in Flashlite seemed a logical progression.

Although Flashlite 2.0 is closer to what web based developers would know (Flash 7), Flashlite 1.1 is more widely available in the current handsets but with reduced capabilities .

In particular features in 2.0 not supported in 1.1 that may have been useful were: XML parsing, Persistent Data storage, and 3D graphics support. However, you do get HTTP, expanded access to phone capabilities, vector graphics, and full navigation support which was enough to produce the application shown.

Despite the limitations we found Flashlite 1.1 easy to use and any restrictions (as we found) can be worked around. In terms of look and feel it was equal to what had been produced previously and was produced much quicker. Although I have heard developers bemoaning the limitations of 1.1, I think (as the project has shown us) it is well worth developing applications with 1.1 until more phones support version 2.0.

Paul Coulton's Forum Nokia Blog

Football in a Flash (Lite)