Google Swiffy

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What Does Google Swiffy Mean?

Google Swiffy is a software tool released by Google Labs in June 2011. Swiffy is used to convert an Adobe Flash/Flex project into HTML5.

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Google Swiffy allows a developer to convert a Flash animation into a browser viewable format, eliminating the need for a Flash player plug-in.

Techopedia Explains Google Swiffy

Google Swiffy takes a compiled Flash/Flex file (known as a SWF file because of its .swf file extension) as input. Swiffy converts the SWF file into an HTML5 file, Cascading Style Sheet 3 (CSS3) file, JavaScript (JS) and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

There are two phases to the Swiffy conversion process, as follows:

  • The Swiffy compiler reads the input SWF file and generates a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file.
  • The JS client runtime uses the JSON file to generate HTML5, CSS3 and SVG files.

The HTML5 output file may then be embedded in a website.

Issues with the original Swiffy release included:

  • Swiffy output only ran on browsers that supported SVG.
  • Swiffy output was not easily editable by developers.
  • Swiffy only supported ActionScript 2.0 conversion, although ActionScript 3.0 was available.
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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.