Over the years I’ve seen a lot of ways to produce SWFs.  Some options were commercial (Generator, Kinetic Fusion, Turbine, Flex, etc..) and some not (Ming, Jzox, etc).  I even did a little hack where I used the command line to fire up the Flash IDE and pop out a customized SWF at will.  I was just experimenting and didn’t use that in a production environment of course and it was all legal like since I was using my one copy of Flash on my own system, etc..  but it was sort of fun in a Frankenstein way to hit the web server on my pc and watch the Flash IDE go through crazy gyrations and spit out a SWF.  It was a poor mans Generator (and not legal so don’t get any ideas.. especially since there are better legal options out now).

Now there’s something around the bend that just brought back those memories and made that hacker inside me cackle a bit in remembrance of those days long ago. 

I was reading some stuff and found my way to posts from about a month ago by Colin Moock and John Nack and Chad Udell. 

You can already create SWFs on a server with Flex, but for most animation and graphic oriented things you really have to do it in the Flash IDE.  If Flash CS4 is indeed going to use XFL as the “source” then it opens the possibility for those cool things the others mentioned (go read their posts if you haven’t already) and changes the Flash production model.  Take a look at what Adobe did with Photoshop Express and Buzzword and..  well.. you run with it.  This could open up some interesting new avenues for Flash production.