MultiLoader – for all your loading needs…

July 30, 2009 – 9:21 pm

I’ve recently had a chance to work on a project I’ve wanted to get on with for ages, and I’ve just completed the Beta release of MultiLoader.

MultiLoader can load in images, text, XML, sounds and videos in a consistent way, and allows you to manage the loading in a number of ways.  It has pretty extensive functionality – including, among other things:

• Simple to use
• Allows prioritising of items
• Force immediate load of an item
• Connection pooling
• Many debugging and error handling options
• A debugging profiler
• Queue management
• Methods for extracting assets from the Flash library

I’ve used BulkLoader on a few projects in the past, and it has saved me a lot of time in past projects, but there were a few things about it that didn’t suit me.  As an FDT user, I’m quite picky about having Errors and Warnings in my projects. That’s part of a debate which can go on forever, as most of them are not errors as such in the eyes of the actual compilers, but I live by FDT’s rules these days, so I want to keep it happy!

The profiler is quite a nice feature – as you’d expect it gives you a running graphical display of what’s going on:

 

Another useful feature is the report, which gives you a pretty print summary trace of what’s going on at that point, ie details of all the loaded items, all the pending items, all the failed items and so on…

The documentation is pretty extensive, and should answer most of your questions regarding usage.

I used BulkLoader for reference while developing MultiLoader, to help myself avoid any unexpected issues, and I’d like to say thanks to Arthur Debert, who has by far the best attitude I have ever come across in my years in this industry.

Thanks also to Shane McCartney, as usual, as I’ve used some of his ideas and adapted some of his utility and abstract classes in the development. 

Please note that this is a Beta release, which means that it’s probably not suitable for use in commercial projects yet.  I would love any feedback – good or bad – and I hope you find it useful!

Finally, MultiLoader is a rubbish name!  I haven’t been able to decide on the final name yet, so again, any suggestions are welcome.