http://www.ribena.co.uk/Developed by
swamp @ brahm, Leeds, UK.
swamp used Gaia to rebuild their current website for GlaxoSmithKline's Ribena - from the ground up.
Senior Developer Jozef Pierlejewski writes about jumping in at the deep end....
Faced with a 4-day initial build deadline, a load of assets from the designers and my own buggy transition engine, I went looking for a set of AS2 libraries that might help me speed up the development process and provide functionality that is common to most websites. Having been overwhelmed by the hardcore-MVC approach and highly technical documentation offered by some of the other frameworks I chanced upon Gaia.
Impressed by the possibilities demonstrated by the Rolling Rock website, I decided to investigate further. With praising testimonials from Jesse Warden, Aral Balkan and 2Advanced (well known names in the Flash community) I was now quite adamant that, despite the looming deadline, I should move my current prototype over to Gaia. Here was a simply documented, well laid-out framework that even a beginner to real Object Oriented Programming could get to grips with. After a few late nights trawling Gaia support and simplifying my over-complicated code I had a rock-solid website in place complete with video transitions, which no amount of mid-navigation button-mashing could break. On top of that I had Deep Linking, Context Menu, and Browser History functionality automatically thrown in for good measure!
Gaia's methodology of stacked (rather than nested) pages took a while to adapt to, and there were a couple of minor isolated bugs to contend with, but Steven Sacks takes a very active role in the support forum and released a new update overnight to deal with any issue that I found.
Even though I have barely touched upon the surface of what Gaia can do, I can already see the time-savings that it would bring me on future projects like this and look forward to using it again.
