Flash for CFers

An Introduction to Rich Internet Application Development

About This Session

• Explanation of an RIA

• Examples of RIAs

• Advantages and “challenges”

• What Flash can do

• Deconstructing a simple RIA

• How Flash and RIAs relate to ColdFusion

What is an RIA?

• Applications that download over the Internet, but run locally on the client

• Primarily exchange only data over socket connections after an initial download rather than “pages”

• Rich Internet “Applets”

• Examples…

Advantages of RIAs

• More interactive, intuitive, entertaining, streamlined user interface

• More advanced functionality than HTML

• More efficient application model (only data being transferred, not entire pages)

• Ubiquitous, cross-platform support

RIA Considerations I

• Performance gains may be negligible because:The time it takes for components to render new

data setsBrowsers are extremely optimized and render

HTML very fastCSS dramatically reduces the size of HTML files

(though still has a somewhat limited audience)Browsers are very good at caching

RIA Considerations II

• There is an initial download with an RIA

• The structure of RIAs can be trickyPeople should only download what they

are going to use

• The Flash player doesn’t support file upload right now

• People are used to HTML

RIA Final Consideration

• Above all else, pick the right tool for the job!

How Does Flash Fit Into Your Application Architecture?

• Integrate Flash into your ColdFusion/HTML application

• Add a Flash interface to your ColdFusion application

Communication Between Flash and ColdFusion

• loadVariables

• LoadVars

• XML

• Flash Remoting

• Web Services (SOAP)

• Socket Connections

ActionScript 2.0• ActionScript is Flash’s scripting language, like

JavaScript• Object oriented

private, protected and public keywords

• Typed• Compile-time error checking!• Exception handling• Java-like syntax

ImportClasspath

• Inheritance

Flash Video

• Flash supports its own video format (FLV)

• Flash encodes, the player decodes

• Sorenson Spark Codec (compression/decompression)

• True streaming capabilities with services like VitalStream.

The Future of Flash RIAs

• Flash Authoring

• ColdFusion

• Central

• Flex

• Breeze

• FlashPaper

• RoboDemo

Deconstructing an RIA

• Application demoA simple ColdFusion application

architectureWDDX for persistenceUsing web services to talk to FlashFlash media streamingSimple Flash animation

Application Diagram