What's in This Book?
As with any technology, as you move away from creating simple applications to creating larger-scale, robust, and secure applications, design and development increase in difficulty. This is especially true in an environment in which events are occurring in multiple Flash movies and on the server at the same time. Coordinating concurrent events introduces an extra level of complexity that many Flash and web developers may not be used to. This book addresses these and other problems directly. It describes in detail how to:
Avoid conflicts when multiple users update data in real time
Manage contention for the same resourcesfor example, multiple users trying to add text to the same shared text area
Minimize the effects of network latency
Adapt to differences in client bandwidth
Use and extend Macromedia's communication classes
Design and develop components that work well within Macromedia's component framework
Design applications without Macromedia's framework using your own set of components
Create applications that can scale from a few simultaneous users to many thousands
Create secure applications
The book also includes numerous samples filesespecially in the later chaptersthat I hope you will find useful, including:
A collection of components such as PeopleGrid, OnlineStatus, TextChat, SharedText, VideoConference, Authentication, and PersonalCursor
An alternative, lightweight component framework
A recording framework for recording and playing back events, audio, video, and data
The book also includes numerous useful ColdFusion examples to perform operations beyond the capabilities of FlashCom Server, such as FTP file copying and database access. All sample code is available on the book's web site.