Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

ff2003: remoting and rich application development

current session: Remoting and Rich Application Development, presented by Mike Chambers, Macromedia.

Flash Remoting simplifies the Flash application development process by providing a powerful yet simple programming model and runtime enabling Macromedia Flash MX to connect to remote services exposed by application servers and web services. Mike Chambers demonstrates how Remoting can be used to create powerful Flash applications that are closely integrated with the server. After a quick overview of Flash Remoting, he will show how to creating client /server ActionScript libraries in order to create modular, resuable client / server code. Chambers will dissect a number of applications that show how these Flash Remoting based libraries can be used to quickly created client /server applications with advanced functionality.

Chambers presented a couple examples of Flash-based RIAs and the coding behind them. One app retrieved and displayed stock quotes, another retrieved e-mail from a POP server. The source files for both are available on the Developer’s Resource Kit, Volume 1.

He offered one notable tip about working with RIAs and Flash Remoting: Try to minimize your calls to the server so as to keep the user from having to wait too long. One way to do this is to cache the data you download from the server. Demonstrating his Flash-based e-mail client, he explained the e-mail caching process: storing downloaded message information into an associative array (sorted by mesage ID).