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 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

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

Application Diagram