Flash Integration Concepts

Macromedia Flash MX 2004

Macromedia Flash MX 2004 is the application you use to create or design new Flash movies. It's an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that contains the drawing tools, animation tools, and code editor you need to create an animation, advertisement, or interactive data presentation for your users.

For your convenience, a 30-day trial version of Flash is provided on the CD-ROM for this book.

The Flash 7 Player

The Flash 7 Player is a browser plug-in that displays Flash movies to Web visitors. Think of it as a mini-browser within your regular Web browser, except that instead of understanding HTML pages, it only understands Flash movies (.swf files). Nearly all browsers come with some version of the Flash Player already installed.

NOTE

For most of the examples in this chapter to work, users need to have version 7 of the player on their computer. With some browsers (particularly Internet Explorer on Windows), the upgrade happens automatically. Other users need to download and install the player from www.macromedia.com.

ColdFusion Components

In Flash, the preferred way to have the Flash Player interact with ColdFusion is to use Cold Fusion Components (CFC). You learned how to create CFCs in Chapter 23, "Building Reusable Components." That chapter focused on creating CFCs for use within ColdFusion pages. The basic idea was to create a CFC with methods that performed whatever processing you needed, and then use those methods in your ColdFusion pages with the <cfinvoke> tag.

In this chapter, you will learn how the Flash Player itself can use those same CFCs.

Flash Remoting

Flash Remoting is the bridge between your CFCs on the ColdFusion server and the Flash player. Flash Remoting consists of two parts: the Gateway, automatically installed when you install Cold Fusion; and the Components, a special set of scripting commands that you use within a Flash movie to interact with your CFCs (through the gateway).

ActionScript

ActionScript is the programming language that you use to control the various elements within a Flash movie. It lets you do things like start and stop animations, make things appear and disappear, and validate form entries. ActionScript is very similar to JavaScript, which is nice because if you know one you are well on your way to understanding the other. When you install the Flash Remoting Components, you are adding a set of functions to ActionScript. You then write simple ActionScript code to trigger interactions between your movie and the CFCs on your server.