Tomás Lin’s Programming Brain Dump

I just finished putting the finishing touches on phase one of our video and animation heavy Flash / Grails / Flex site. We spent about 2 months on this site, figuring out how to get Flex, Flash and Grails to work together nicely, and I thought I would share some of the lessons learned in this post.

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I’ve been busy figuring out how Grails can help search engine rankings of Flex / Flash applications. In this post, I will show how the SWFObject library can be used with Grails layouts to enable a SEO technique called Progressive Enhancement ( thanks Ted! ).

Progressive Enhancement is a technique that allows the same content to be shown to different users, regardless of the ways in which the content is viewed. The idea is that the same content should appear on a Flash player page and one that is plain HTML and indexed by the Google searchbots. Read the rest of this entry »

The company I used to work for, Elastic Path in Vancouver, invested heavily in making sure that their ecommerce engine was Search Engine Optimized. This was a complicated black art that involved shaping the URL and content of your web page so that Google and Yahoo could pick up the results. There are tons of books out there about this subject, and even people who specialize in this. The company I’m working for now, through it’s iProspect.com branch, also focuses heavily on Search Engine Optimizing websites and pages.

SEO becomes harder with dynamic Rich UI applications that don’t rely on Ajax. While Google is able to pick up Flash SWF files during it’s crawl, this does not guarantee that the content is parsed correctly or given the same weight as any other file formats or a pure HTML/AJAX page. Worse, if the application uses a web service, how can it be guaranteed that all the pages are crawled and returned correctly.
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