Transcript Presentation - CF Conf Central

Flash for CFers
An Introduction to Rich Internet
Application Development
About This Session
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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
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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
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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