Easy Lookup is the Secret Sauce for Large-Scale Database App

If you’ve attended an online web conference, chances are you’ve used WebEx. Every month, more than 3.5 million people use Cisco’s WebEx products to host online web meetings, share applications and collaborate on projects with customers, partners and colleagues around the world.

Andy Steele is in charge of multi media at WebEx. He was embarking on a complex project to rebuild the Flash components of the WebEx website so that graphic designers could easily generate new Flash files from Webex’s content management system (CMS). Andy wanted web and graphic designers with no software development backgrounds to be able to update Flash content without first having to learn how to program in Flash. This was especially key for localization as WebEx has websites in several languages; there are currently seven localized Webex sites with plans to go to 12 this year. By enabling dynamic updates to Flash files, web designers would be able to update content across Webex’s international sites more quickly, easily and cost effectively. Plus, they would no longer need to make changes to individual Flash files on each one of Webex’s international websites–a tricky proposition when content is in Portugese or Korean, or when you want all your localized websites to look the same.

Herein lies the problem. Flash Professional is the authoring tool used to build Flash movie files, also known as .swf files. As it stands, Flash files constructed using the Flash Professional tool, like the WebEx Flash files, cannot be changed or updated without rebuilding each file from scratch. To do this, a designer needs to know how to code using Flash, which can be complicated and time consuming. So, Andy hired Nitobi to convert the Webex into flexible XML files whose content can be updated and then turned back into Flash files by the CMS.

Here’s how Nitobi did it. First, they converted the current WebEx homepage and sub-pages designed in Flash Professional with hard-coded, static content, into Flash pages that could be generated dynamically from the CMS. Using a combination of Actionscript and Flash, Nitobi developed code that would read an XML document from the WebEx CMS. Then, Nitobi deconstructed each Flash file and rebuilt them all piece-by-piece so they would integrate with the CMS. This Flash shell accepts XML, parses it server side and then dynamically reconstruct Flash elements, animations and all. As a result the static Flash files can be extracted into XML files, sent to localization companies who translate and update the file content, and then are easily turned into a German, Spanish or Mandarin website.

Nitobi project leader, James Douma, says language localization was the biggest challenge off all. One of the limitations of dynamically creating Flash files is in the way Flash uses and displays fonts. Unlike a web browser that reference the fonts already installed on a user’s computer to display them correctly, Flash converts the characters into vector shapes, or images. The problem here is that all the letters must first be ‘stored’ in the file or the letter shapes won’t render properly. You can get around this problem for small character sets, like English, by storing every letter in the alphabet. But, this doesn’t work for Asian character sets that may have thousands of detailed characters. If you store every character image, the resulting Flash file will be several megabytes in size and would take far too long to download. Nitobi’s solution was to pre-scan the XML from the CMS and construct a special font Flash file that included shapes for all the present characters. With this utility, custom Flash movies with the appropriate character sets embedded can be delivered to the browser in a just-in-time manner to improve the responsiveness and reduce page load times.

With the new, flexible Flash pages in place Webex can quickly and easily update Flash content across all its international websites without the time consuming job of having to update Flash files one at a time. Now, new content and graphics can be rolled out by an intermediate designer anywhere in the world easily from inside the Webex CMS.