AS3 libraries for crypto are pretty robust from the new RAW POWER in the AVM2 virtual machine that runs flash9/as3, cryptography, like compression, is very processor intensive and needs a fair amount of power to be worth the time (usually a balancing mechanism). I am working on a few security apps in AIR and Flash9 for a project and a product so this is the best of what I have found to share. I will be sure to post here when these projects are complete.

There are two that are pretty good as3 kits that have decent support for crypto and hashing, actually as3crypto is quite broad in their support or most common crypto algorithms, even hashing support up to SHA-256 and ciphers 3DES, AES, RC4.

This is not really a comparison just some kits that have tools you might need. as3crypto is definitely the way to go for more heavy ecryption with common ciphers, but if you are just hashing some text as3corelib might work for your project. as3corelib is a more broad toolkit that is made or sponsored by Adobe that has JSON, RSS, support and other tools. It is a great core lib, but not as deep in the encryption area. I am actually using both in the stuff I am working on, as3corelib for some other uses (JSON,RSS) and as3crypto for all encryption and hashing.

The two are:

• as3corelib
  • Open source
  • Support for hashing algorithms only.
  • Browse source

• as3crypto
  • Robust, broad encryption and security support
  • Open source
  • Demo
  • Browse source
  • Broad support of algorithms
    • • TLS 1.0 support, exposed through TLSSocket and TLSEngine classes
      • X.509 Certificate support, including parsing, and validation
      • built-in list of common root Certificate Authorities
      • symmetric ciphers: AES, Blowfish, DES, 3DES, XTEA, RC4
      • confidentiality modes: CTR, CBC, CFB, CFB-8, OFB, ECB
      • public key crypto: RSA (encryption, decryption, signing, verifying and key generation)
      • padding: PKCS#1 (type 1 and 2), PKCS#5
      • BigInteger library
      • hashing function: SHA-256, SHA-224, SHA-1, MD5, MD2
      • HMAC support
      • prng: TLSPRF and stream-cypher-based PRNG.
      • minimal ASN-1/DER support for PEM key parsing and X-509 cert parsing
      • Crypto – Shortcut class to access many classes above.
      • Hex, Base64 – Static methods to convert binary data to and from text formats

Here’s some numbers from as3Crypto home page that show the speed, note it has not been optimized just yet (since most of this is client side and only one user would be using it this is not an issue – server side is where this can have scale problems from parallel execution but flash is rarely server side if it is too slow, but it is quite fast)

The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
md2                  1.01k        3.64k       15.08k       53.89k      171.76k
md5                221.85k      447.32k      739.54k      893.72k      905.82k
sha1                82.28k      184.78k      286.76k      336.03k      345.41k
sha224              60.84k      125.67k      200.27k      234.28k      247.58k
sha256              60.52k      126.30k      199.19k      234.04k      246.01k
hmac-md5            48.37k      159.37k      282.87k      295.15k      341.21k
hmac-sha1           18.29k       64.82k      165.72k      277.60k      342.52k
hmac-sha224          5.75k       24.84k      125.71k      204.35k      256.36k
hmac-sha256         15.10k       49.33k      123.71k      206.17k      249.08k
rc4                117.24k      381.34k      878.93k     1315.01k     1539.44k
xtea-cbc             2.49k        6.48k       12.80k       33.00k       44.48k
aes128-cbc           1.61k        4.01k       22.97k       78.55k      205.01k
aes192-cbc           1.34k        5.13k       20.91k       69.45k      172.43k
aes256-cbc           1.48k        5.63k       18.87k       63.45k      150.39k
blowfish-cbc         2.77k       10.81k       42.28k      140.27k      343.05k
des-cbc              2.53k        9.73k       35.20k      124.84k      624.88k
3des-cbc             2.50k        9.72k       35.61k      115.21k      253.42k

The library has not been optimized for speed, and those numbers could probably be improved.

They both have minimal or none ASN.1 support which I will need but I can port much of this from my favorite Java/C# crypto kit from the legion of the bouncy castle of which I was happy to find was a substantial base for this kit.

Whatever you do don’t send any type of message from your crypto kits with aes 256 cipher and sha-256 hashing to Iran from the US.

Great news! Polygonal Labs has released the long awaited Motor Physics engine. It is now called Motor2.

UPDATE: Now hosted at Google code

Project hosted at code.google.com/p/motor2
License: New BSD License

After the port of Box2DFlashAS3 appeared the fate of Motor Physics engine was unknown. But with time and just before the stroke of midnight on the final hour of 2007 Michael Baczynski released Motor2 2D physics engine on the world.

This now gives us, count them, FOUR AS3 Physics engines that were released in 2007 in order of release.

• APE
• FOAM
• Box2DFlashAS3
• Motor2 (based on Box2d as well)

Be sure to check the demos of Motor Physics:

• 200 stacked boxes
• polygon soup (this one flows like water)
• compound shapes

To get the source head on over to the blog and in the post it is in the first para.

Currently you can get the source for the preview here.

Polygonal always has such great information and demo write ups the source link gets lost in there. Hopefully this will be at Google code soon or a public SVN. The code looks great and there are optimizations in there but even those are elegant.

With 3 excellent flash as3 3d engines (papervision3d, away3d, sandy), 4 physics engines, lots of great utilities like FZip or ASZip, AlivePDF, Red5, haXe etc etc. 2008 is looking like it will be a great year for performance, optimization and gaming/app platforms on the web like never before seen. I am most looking forward to the coming gaming market for flash, lots of possibilities. With the added competition from Silverlight, much innovation will happen here.

It is great that Motor2, which has a great author and dedicated to performance has joined the physics engine scene, not only that posting on new years eve. Thanks to all that make the flash platform possible of creating excellent new fun and useful tools.

UPDATE: Now hosted at Google code

Project hosted at code.google.com/p/motor2
License: New BSD License

Picnik is an excellent application that makes believers out of RIA skeptics made with Flash/Flex.   Today Picnik is now integrated with Flickr bringing user friendly photoshop essentially to the masses. 

This is a pretty interesting market direction as more photo companies like photobucket and flickr add to the competition for photo editing. As flash based uploads, photo editors, word processors, presentation creators, conference systems, office apps, planning apps and many others all over the web does this mean the services model is really here and RIA is not just a fad?

The model of software is changing, again. The one competitive edge that web applications, and specifically RIA apps have over desktop is that many desktop apps are bloated, have legacy evolution that caused heavy, busy interfaces and absolutely no abstraction of the possible user level in many cases. Web applications are for a broad audience so these applications will see many benefits in making simplified versions of applications for lower skilled users, and then for advanced users more features.

The model is entirely different. They also have the ability to embed in sites like flickr, photobucket, social networks, office product offerings, small business servers, etc.  They could even compete on these sites.  The install base will not be millions of client computers but networks and clusters of users at online places and services.

This was a dream with ASP applications and software as a service.  The problem was before RIA some of the limits of the web were preventing web apps from overtaking and beating out the features of desktop apps. RIAs and the web, web services, user controlled  environments are changing the way software is used. is   We aren’t entirely there yet but RIAs are reviewing their schematics, late at night, and are slowly taking over the software world and changing the model.  Like a ninja is Picnik.

Regarding Picnik, I can’t say enough about the simplicity, clean design that they have pulled off here.  The website and application have an identical brand.  The application is extremely responsive and acts like html sites would when it comes to text and forms. The integration of services, webcam, all filters in flash, on and on.  They really have a great team and it seems like they are both a great product team but also have the right quality. The new market is extremely agile, the paradigm is shifting.

Only a year after release Papervision is getting a major update to 2.0.

Get it while it is hot from the SVN server on google code: http://papervision3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/branches/GreatWhite

Papervision3D, launched a year ago, really sparked the AS3 and flash/flex world and inspired every flash guru I know into working on this code. There have been some great tools made and some fwa’s won but it is only the beginning.

I am mostly looking forward to performance enhancements, ascollada integration, culling and Andy Zupko’s 2d bitmap effects on 3d.

New features:

• Faster!
• ShadeMaterials
• Shaders
• ASCollada (animation support)
• Frustrum Culling
• Multiple Viewports (3d editor anyone?)
• Render to Scene
• and more!

SVN server and branch:

• http://papervision3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/branches/GreatWhite

We do indeed like to ride the racecars!

Another great new 2D physics engine for AS3 has been released called Box2dFlashAS3 that is based on the excellent kit Box2D for C++. It has been a busy year for physics engines in AS3. FOAM was released this month, APE, the highly anticipated Motor Physics from polygonal labs and plenty more still I am sure.

The Box2dFlashAS3 version has some great demos available on the site that show, use the arrow keys to move to the different demos highlighted here.

1. bridge
   
2. ragdolls
   
3. compound shapes
   
4. rube goldberg / domino / tank tracks etc
   
5. stacked boxes
   
6. slider crank / piston
   
7. pulleys
   
8. gears
   

Box2DFlashAS3 is an open source port of Erin Catto’s powerful c++ physics library Box2D. Cycle through the demos to see some of the features.

Full source code for the engine and examples can be downloaded from the project’s sourceforge page found Here.

This kit is nice because it mimics Box2D for the crossover and ability of developers to use it in C++ and Flash AS3 moreso than other kits. It looks good and performs well except for a memory or FPS pause I get intermittently.  The demos are already inspiring many uses of the features highlighted for games and effects.

Sandy 3.0 was released today. To go along with that a RedSandy (Red5 and sandy demo) has also been released. Sandy is the original 3d flash engine that was around before Papervision3D and Away3D and all the others. Sandy3d is an excellent library and it has many features that others do not have well particularly in the easier control of objects and importing all types of files such as ASE, WRL and 3ds in addition to COLLADA which other 3d engines like PV3d and Away3d support although it has been slower in the past 3.0 may change that.

Sandy 3D engine main features are :

• Flash player 7 to 9 compatibility.

• Both MTASC and Macromedia compilers compliant for AS2 and Flash CS3 and FlexBuilder for AS3 versions.

• Several 3D primitives, allowing fast and parameterized object creation without any 3D modelisation knowledge.

• Advanced and easy object management allowing some fantastic possibilities during your creations (scaling, rotation, translation, tween, etc.)

• Advanced camera management ( rotation, motion on linear or bezier-curve path, movements, etc.)

• Complex object loading thanks to the .ASE and .WRL files parser , but also Collada and 3DS files for AS3, (files generated by several 3D object modeling packages such as 3D Studio Max or Blender)

• Material system to easily change your objects appearance. Several material are available allowing to create transparent faces, bitmap texture and video texture as webcam video stream.

• Managment of Flash filters bringing some very nice visual effects

Red5 is the best multi-user media server out there right now and it is built with Java.

The cool and probably most interesting part is Sandy combined with Red5 to create multi-user environments in 3d for flash. There have been experiments with this and many attempts at this and is being done but an open source kit that does this is very helpful and these are two great flash toolkits in Sandy and Red5.

• Download Sandy
• Sandy 3.0 announcement post
  
• Introduction to the RedSandy project and SVN
• Installing the Red5 ‘Engine’ application
• Security Considerations
• Sandy 3.0 Technotes
  

Get your game on!

Getting started video with Sandy 3.0 with a wise robot
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPz4VwIlrQg]

Drew Cummin’s FOAM is a great flash as3 2d physics package that can be integrated quickly and get started with realistic physics in 2d flash apps and games. I have been playing with this since FOAM’s release last week and putting together some tests to show, comparing with APE and really looking forward to polygonal labs Motor Physics to add there.

Three excellent physics engines (FOAM, APE and Motor Physics) for flash in AS3 already. Basically at flash9 player/avm2 market saturation (it is now available to develop on in over 94% of market) is showing the power of the ES4/Javascript2 based Actionscript3 language and how it is inspiring developers to new levels of interest/inspiration. Then again haXe can target them all but I digress.

FOAM was recently released but the author Drew Cummins is showing very good support for the toolkit and released a plethora of goodins to support this great kit, bug fixes, samples, docs and some realistic physics demos as well as in depth walkthrough of creating a force generator and comparison of the Euler and RK4 equations used in that process and their differences (Euler being less correct due to the factors of the platform and intervals and environment, RK4 more correct but more expensive to run)

If you are developing realistic physics in flash games or apps this toolkit is a great source of inspiration.

• Demo showing semi-realistic physics and the results of the Euler and RK4 Solver in an orbit scenario
• Excellent post describing the IForceGenerator interface to make a GravitationalForceGenerator class used in the demo
• Code sample orbit of realistic physics (AS3)
• Code sample of GravitationalForceGenerator class (AS3)
  
• Euler class in FOAM
  
• RK4 class in FOAM
• FOAM AS3 2d physics engine source at Google Code
• Perpetual Fall
• Zero G Toy Chest

Flash and Silverlight allow developers to make amazing tools, they allow creative expression and they also are usually a bad user experience many times.

Lots of that is changing as more applications are made and frameworks like Flex and Silverlight progress. Much of the needed performance is now available for Flash/Flex in AS3 and the AVM2 virtual machine that runs it, making full applications much faster for all actions that might have been a drag in AS2 and vector based application’s of the past. Some great tools were made with this still that were usable like gModeler a flash based UML modeling tool but the performance boost will make these applications even more usable for mainstream.

Some great examples of user friendly apps where the flash or the silverlight element doesn’t blind the developer from usability. These applications might really have a market for general users of applications from advanced depending on feature set as long as they are usable.

buzzword (Flash/Flex/AS3)

Is a word processor that is really well done. This is made with Flex and everything from validation to the toolset is very usable and clean. I use Google Docs and haven’t looked back for about a year but this application is a nice change to web editors for documents at the current state. It included all the usual basic functionality and great new zoom, revision history and sharing tools that web office tools like word processors has come to expect. Be sure to try this one.

scrapblog (Flash/Flex/AS3)
scapblog is a bloggy/presentation that is a great template editor and the tools are broad and expected from users including great integration with the web for photos and video at major sites such as photobucket, flickr, etc.

Google SearchMash (Flex/Flash/AS3)

This is a Flex 2 (actionscript 3) application that is very fast and usable in vector.

Sample Textured 3d Vista demo(Silverlight 1.0)

This demo showcases the speed of Silverlight and a usable OS like interface that performs well. It showcases Silverlight but also has great usability in expected user actions and results.

tafiti (Silverlight 1.0 demo)

Tafiti is a search tool that uses SIlverlight and live search to represent search results in a rich way. They did a pretty good job with usability and especially considering the Silverlight 1.0 lack of good input controls. Little bit laggy.

The point is solution developers should use technology but most importantly make it functional and usable to what users expect. RIAs will succeed very well as long as you can select text, hit back buttons, deep linking, use menu systems, integrate services, have all the features of apps not in vector engines like Flash or Silverlight and to make it mainstream friendly they need to have a low bar of entry and just work. RIAs have an advantage right now as office apps move to the web and photo apps as well, many of these apps above would appeal to general computer users in addition to advanced users.

Alternativa Game is a leap forward in isometric 3d engines for flash. A gigantic leap…, would you expect this kind of quality of software out of anyone but the Russian Alternativa Game group? Check it out NOW.

The demo runs suprisingly smooth. I had to kick down the quality just a bit to get started but once I did that it was very smooth, full 360 degree turning, texturing levels, render quality, day/night, and many more features. You have to try the day and night, check the lighting coming out of the window…

More from Anton Volkov:

This is technological demoversion of an Alternativa3D Flash engine, which was made within Alternativa MMORPG development. This engine uses Flash player version 9 as a platform, and, as far as we know, works in all full-flash-supporting browsers. Alternativa3D is optimized with upcoming game features in mind, and utilizes some non-trivial solutions to show game graphics quickly.

Main features:

• Three-dimensional geometry and 3D-sprites. Buildings and landscape are made in a fair 3D, objects with complex geometry — using sprites, including multi-phase ones.
• Lighting system, including ambient, directional and omni lights. Changing daytime, diffuse and sunlight, automatical “in-corners” shading, dynamic shadows, including sprite shadows.
• Texture and light quality settings (it is really important without 3D hardware acceleration in Flash).
• Low processor load (excluding moments of lighting change and camera rotation, which happen not too often and is not critical for the game).

This is on par with Paul Spitzer’s amazing FPS flash engine.

You can follow this amazing development over at the Alternativa Game blog. I suspect quite a bit of interest now that they have thrown it down. Apparently when Anton and the guys of Alternativa throws down, they bring it!

This is only possible in AS3, this would be nothing more than a prototype test in AS2 but in AS3 it is fast enough and much much more capable of building stuff like this.

Here is a performance test by Jack at GreenSock who created TweenLite and TweenFilterLite that tests Tweener, TweenLite, Fuse/ZigoEngine and Twease animation kits for flash. This test is only AS2 but in this test TweenLite is quite a ways ahead in means of performance for many tweens via code. I would like to use this in AS3 to check the speeds there as well but from the onset it appears if you have many tweens that the smaller TweenLite kit compared to the AS2 version of Tweener and Twease is the better bet for performance.

Personally I don’t do much AS2 other than maintenance or converting to AS3 so I will be digging into this further this week in AS3 to check the speeds.

In Jack’s AS2 benchmark it appears they are pretty even up until around 150-200 Tweens per half second. If your application is built in AS2 and has more than 200 Tweens per second (very possible in gaming and just to have processing left over for other things) then TweenLite seems like it has less overhead. TweenLite is pulling in a respectable 10FPS on this machine at 500 tweens per .5 seconds.

UPDATE: Jack has updated the test to include AS2 (the dog) and AS3 for Tweener and TweenLite. This version in AS3 the threshold is much much higher and Tweener at 1200 tweens comes in around 10fps on this machine while TweenLite comes in at 1200 tweens at 15-20fps. They again are pretty even until around 800 tweens per second on this test machine where a critical mass is hit, at that point TweenLite starts scaling a bit better and around 1200 tweens is roughly double the FPS. I need to look further at the benchmark test as it is made by one of the authors but Jack is a respectable source and offers the source so anyone is willing to look at this. Results will vary but I think this still shows Tweener has a slightly smaller overhead (which when you compound it with many short tweens it adds up) but does not negate the use or quality of Tweener as 1200 tweens per half second is very respectable thanks to the new AVM2 virtual machine in AS3, but it is always important to perform to save up room for other kits such as Papervision3D and memory for more assets. I think this has been a very worthwhile exercise and I think that a need for a comparison tool for all animation kits in AS2 and AS3 (or just AS3 as we move forward), it will only improve both toolkits. Also, not just straight tweens but bezier, color, filters and general movement.

As always thanks Zeh, Jack and Nate for your excellent toolkits and work that you put out there.