Flash for CFers

1
Flash for CFers

• An Introduction to Rich Internet Application
  Development

2
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

3
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

4
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

5
RIA Considerations I

• Performance gains may be negligible because
• The time it takes for components to render new
  data sets
• Browsers are extremely optimized and render HTML
  very fast
• CSS dramatically reduces the size of HTML files
  (though still has a somewhat limited audience)
• Browsers are very good at caching

6
RIA Considerations II

• There is an initial download with an RIA
• The structure of RIAs can be tricky
• People should only download what they are going
  to use
• The Flash player doesnt support file upload
  right now
• People are used to HTML

7
RIA Final Consideration

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

8
How Does Flash Fit Into Your Application
Architecture?

• Integrate Flash into your ColdFusion/HTML
  application
• Add a Flash interface to your ColdFusion
  application

9
Communication Between Flash and ColdFusion

• loadVariables
• LoadVars
• XML
• Flash Remoting
• Web Services (SOAP)
• Socket Connections

10
ActionScript 2.0

• ActionScript is Flashs scripting language, like
  JavaScript
• Object oriented
• private, protected and public keywords
• Typed
• Compile-time error checking!
• Exception handling
• Java-like syntax
• Import
• Classpath
• Inheritance

11
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.

12
The Future of Flash RIAs

• Flash Authoring
• ColdFusion
• Central
• Flex
• Breeze
• FlashPaper
• RoboDemo

13
Deconstructing an RIA

• Application demo
• A simple ColdFusion application architecture
• WDDX for persistence
• Using web services to talk to Flash
• Flash media streaming
• Simple Flash animation

14
Application Diagram