Section 4.9. Designing Communication Applications

4.9. Designing Communication Applications

Designing a communication application usually means more than designing a FlashCom application and its instances. A communication application may involve more than one FlashCom application and many application instances. A simple example is a FlashCom lobby application and a chat room application working together to provide a chat system. Users may visit different lobby instances of the lobby application before connecting to instances of the chat room application.

Applications and application instances are the core resources FlashCom provides to partition server resources and organize communication applications. Users should be grouped into separate instances in order to maintain system performance and allocate resources such as shared objects and streams.

Designing communication applications requires planning what FlashCom applications and instances will be available, what services an application instance should provide, and what resources such as streams, shared objects, and database access are needed to provide the service. The design often includes defining how instances will be controlled and createdsometimes by other instancesand how clients will move between them.