Section 16.3. Conclusion

16.3. Conclusion

Just as there are different types of FlashCom applications, there are different approaches to building multi-instance applications that are scalable and fault-tolerant. Media-on-demand, live one-way broadcasting, and n -way communication applications all provide different challenges. Applications that require real-time instance coordination are more challenging to design and build than those that do not. Component-based applications are a good way to partition multi-instance applications. The components introduced in Chapter 13 through Chapter 15 have client- and server-side parts that work together. In a multi-instance application, a good practice is to further divide components so that their server-side parts know how to communicate with one another. In a simple broadcast tree, a stream list component might have four partsone each for a source client, root server, leaf server, and destination client. Writing each part of the component separately simplifies multi-instance development.

This chapter has dealt with building multi-instance and multiserver applications that don't bog down as the number of client connections increases . Unfortunately, adding instances and servers won't help application performance over slow network connections. The next chapter describes what you can do to provide a good application experience despite network limitations.