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