In the past we used, and still do, tools such as Sothink SWF Decompiler and URLActionEditor to analyse flash files and amend them accordingly. But enter OneVision wo’ve been busy in the intervening years and by all accounts have built out a fully-featured pre-flighting tool called Contenio for use by online AdOps departments to check and authorise creatives as they come into the department. I haven’t yet seen the product working but I’m hopeful it will address some of the ore recurrent themes such as checking for clickTag() case sensitivity/spelling, fix _root. issues, check for embedded urls, check for target=”_blank” etc, but hopefully we’ll get to see this in action soon and report back our findings.

For those of you trying to automate out your QA process this could be of vital interest. I look forward to speaking to someone who’s currently or planning on working with this soon.

Enter Spoon.net a recent discovery which has managed to resolve this problem. Thanks to their virtualisation software I have been able to have IE6, IE7 and IE8 all running at the same time whilst all using httpWatch and AOL’s WebPageTest concurrently as well.

It’s not just browsers either, here’s a blurb from their site:
Spoon specializes in app virtualization and delivery technology, a family of sophisticated techniques that decouple apps from the underlying operating system and enable extremely rapid delivery and launch. In support of its ongoing product development efforts, Spoon conducts fundamental research in the areas of virtualization, operating systems, formal semantics, programming languages, complexity theory, and cryptography.

You’ll need to install Spoon.net’s plugin first but this is no big deal. Once installed simply click on one of the icons of the browser you want to test, if this is your first time launching that browser version it will download what I can only assume is the a local ‘image’ of that browser and when this is down will launch it just like any other application.

All in all this is an excellent site and well worth adding to your AdOps toolbox.

Downsides: Not supported on the Mac or on Chrome or on Opera from my initial tests.

Recently I’ve been looking at ways we can programmatically analyse ad file types and then test them against agreed standards. This will be for GIFs, JPG, PNG and more importantly SWFs. However, SWF decompilation can be a tricky beast and I plan on delving into the more in-depth in a related article but for the meantime here are a few tools that can accomplish it that we use ourselves. So lets begin:

SWFTools: [http://www.swftools.org/]
SWFTools is a set of command-line utilities for interacting with Flash files on the server. They provide the ability to create and decompile flash units and as they are on the command line means that web-services are able to interact with them, meaning you can build your own web-tools or incorporate them into back-systems you may have built in-house. I’m not going to delve into how to use this tool here just yet but I will go about showing you how, given shell access to your hosting account you should be able to install these tools locally.

The quick answer to getting this up on your account is to amend the ./configure line to include a –prefix=/home/UASERNAMEHERE/swtoolsinstalldir I’ll cover this in full below.

The SWFTools FAQ details standard installation as:

tar -zvxf swftools-0.x.x.tar
cd swftools-0.x.x
./configure
make
make install

This would fail on Dreamhost accounts as the make install requires root access which you’re not going to get top be honest. But never fear, this is easily circumvented without putting security at risk. The key here is to not try and install this on a machine-wide basis, that is create your own instance this program locally to your account.

• Create a directory called swftools in your home directory
• chdir into this directory and download the required tar.gz [At time of writing this was http://www.swftools.org/swftools-2009-08-24-2042.tar.gz]
• untar/unzip this to that dir
• chdir to the the folder this has created
• run the nromal installation script but change the ./configure line to “./configure –prefix=/home/USERNAMEHERE/swftools/” where USERNAMEHERE is replaced by your username
• complete the rest of script as detailed in the FAQ
• after this is installed change up a directory and remove the source files and directories

I’ve written this out a single list of commands here, remember to change the USERNAMEHERE to your account username.

cd ~/
mkdir swftools
cd swftools
wget http://www.swftools.org/swftools-2009-08-24-2042.tar.gz
tar -zxvf swftools-2009-08-24-2042.tar.gz
cd swftools-2009-08-24-2042
./configure --prefix=/home/USERNAME/swftools
make
make install
cd ..
rm -rf swftools-*

And that should be that To verify your installation do the following:
~/swftools/bin/swfdump -V
You should get back a response along the lines of
swfdump - part of swftools 2009-08-24-2042
If that’s there then Bob is your proverbial uncle and you’ve successfully managed to install SWFTools, well done.

NOTES:
When I configured my SWFTools I got one error:
checking for missing libraries... ungif gif_lib.h
***************************************************
* The following headers/libraries are missing: ungif gif_lib.h
* Disabling gif2swf tool...
***************************************************
Which means I don’t have access to the gif2swf feature, but that was not needed for my purposes. When I work out how to fix this I’ll post this fix back here as well. Have fun and please post back your successes and any interesting tolls you’ve created from it… happy coding.