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.
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.