Flash decompilation is a touchy subject to many people. There is the unethical aspect that quickly comes into focus when talking about decompilation. There is a time where having a solid tool to handle decompilation is critical. If you’ve ever lost an FLA or had one become corrupt then you know this need well. Another legitimate use of decompilation is learning how a particular effect or a piece of functionality was created.

So as a disclaimer I’ll have to say that I do not advocate stealing another businesses or developers work. Businesses spend considerable amounts of money to conceptualize and build breathtaking applications. Developers spend countless hours coding, debugging and testing and many times they become attached to the codebase. It’s unethical at best to steal from another business or developer. Just don’t do it, ok?

In the world of software development and specifically web development decompilation is however unavoidable. If you develop an application you should always be prepared for the chance that it could be reverse engineered. It may not be ethical but it is always a possibility.

Now with all of that out of the way lets take a look at an awesome application that can be used to decompile and reassemble SWF files. Trillix is very, very impressive. I’ve used a few different decompilation utilities over the years when FLAs corrupted on me or were misplaced. Trillix stands up to the competition. Some of the features and functionality are, well, amazing.

The code decompilation is pretty good. You can customize the syntax coloring which is cool. The real power of Trillix is its ability to convert an SWF back into an FLA. I only converted a few simple SWFs back to FLA but the results were stunning. The FLAs that get reassembled appear to be pretty usable and intact. This functionality would be a life saver if you lost an FLA or had one corrupt on you. Another great use for Trillix would be if a client didn’t have the FLA and came to you with change requests for their application. Trillix also had sophisticated funtionality to extract resources from SWFs including graphics, audio and MovieClips. Trillix can also convert SWFs to EXE projectors. Another powerful feature is the ability to edit the internal assets of an SWF and then save out an updated version of the SWF.

Other than the ability to decompile AS3 source there may not be a ton of functionality for Flex developers. I’d highly recommend Trillix to Flash developers though. The price of 80$ is definitely worth it to have a tool this powerful around. If you were ever in the need for a FLA recovery tool you’d be extremely relieved to own a copy of Trillix.