Flash Remoting services_4

For anyone who has succeeded in interfacing Flash movies with ColdFusion, MX's new Flash

Remoting Services are a true godsend. What used to require a good bit of knowledge in Flash

ActionScripting (the language of Flash), plus hours or days of laboring in Flash and ColdFusion

MX, now takes only a basic understanding of ActionScript and a few lines of code to link a

Flash movie with ColdFusion. If you're new to ColdFusion, you'll still be amazed at how easy

Flash Remoting makes creating Flash movies that use the functionality built into your

ColdFusion applications.

Where earlier versions of Flash were basically crude animation tools that could be forced into

exchanging data with ColdFusion, Flash Remoting turns the Flash MX authoring environment

into a true client-application development environment that is designed from the ground up

to work directly with ColdFusion MX. Flash MX applications communicate with ColdFusion by

using a new and very efficient binary format named AMF (Action Message Format), which is

not only faster but requires only a fraction of the bandwidth previously taken up by XMLbased

data exchanges.

Flash Remoting enables you to develop applications with truly interactive graphical user

interfaces. The best that you could do before Flash Remoting came along was to create an

overly complicated DHTML convolution that either cached data locally or made constant

page requests from ColdFusion each time that the user touched a form control.

Chapter 26 shows you how to create a basic Flash Remoting interface with interactive controls,

but it is not a comprehensive lesson. If you are interested in developing serious Flash

MX applications—and we hope that you are—you should also obtain the Flash MX Action

Script Bible, by Robert Reinhardt and Joey Lott (Wiley Publishing) and digest it thoroughly. I

recommend this book not because it comes from the same publisher as this one, but because

Robert Reinhardt and Joey Lott have done an excellent treatment of Flash MX that should not

be missed.