The Adobe Flash® (SWF) Writer provides FME with the ability to write Flash export files. Flash is a movie creation and display application designed to deliver vector graphics and animation over the Internet.
Overview
Flash files are stored in compressed, binary, tag-formatted .swf files. The MIME type is application/x-shockwave-flash.
Flash files are compressed so they can be used as web content, but this means that file creation takes longer due to the extensive compression techniques that are employed. Writing the movie to the .swf file can take up to three times as long as processing the features. Processing the features themselves is also more time-consuming than with some other formats due to the conversions and formatting of features that takes place (see notes on particular features).
In addition, since Flash was not originally designed to handle maps or large numbers of features, performance declines according to the number of features. Therefore, in order to improve performance, we recommend that the features be generalized before being sent to the Flash writer.
A Flash movie may consist of several frames, however, the Flash Writer uses only one frame at a time to hold the converted image if the animate draw option is turned off; otherwise, each feature is stored in a frame and then they are displayed incrementally, which results in the map drawing itself bit by bit.