The first question you need to ask yourself when laying the groundwork for a Flash MX based kiosk on a touch-screen system is: "Will I be able to make the kiosk do what I need it to do with Flash alone, or will I have to use additional software to complement Flash MX?" Perhaps you may need to control hardware devices or peripherals attached to the kiosk. For example: Your kiosk project may need to receive input from a bar code scanner that is attached to the kiosk, or receive input from some other specialty input device. Obviously, these extra devices may dictate the platform or operating system that is the core of your kiosk, but one avenue to consider if you are deploying on a Microsoft-based platform, such as Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP, would be to use an ActiveX control to handle talking to the hardware. FScommands or geturls issued from within your Flash MX application to a hidden frame in a browser-based design could trigger commands that contain embedded ActiveX objects. These ActiveX objects could be programmed to talk (at a lower level than Flash is currently capable of) to the actual system drivers, such as a bar code scanner serial driver, or even the operating system itself. Another solution would be to run a web server directly on the kiosk and use a back-end scripting language or middleware to handle the communication to your hardware. Writing a custom Apache module or an ISAPI or DLL for Microsoft IIS to talk to your hardware is certainly an option you may pursue. Although those are not necessarily skills that every Flash MX programmer has in his personal toolbox, these are the types of challenges you may come up against in developing a kiosk system with Flash MX as the primary user interface and application. Thus, you should keep an open mind to additional expenses or development costs associated with using Flash MX in this manner should the situation call for it.
These are just a few examples of a variety of hurdles you may need to overcome. The best way to identify these obstacles or challenges in a project is to begin with a detailed road map of what exactly your kiosk needs to do, and what specialty hardware will need to be used. This should be as detailed as possible so that you may lay out your plan of attack. The main items listed next should definitely be considered when creating such a road map because they are crucial to designing and deploying a Flash-based kiosk. This is in addition, of course, to the road map or functionality outline of the Flash application itself.
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