Section 13.11. Conclusion

13.11. Conclusion

If you've read through the sample components described in this chapter, you should be ready to adapt them to your purposes and even build your own. You may also be wondering about some of the limitations of what you've seen. For example, many of the components have duplicate methods . Consider the addObjectPath( ) method of every server-side object or the set name ( ) method of all the client-side components. A good way to reduce the redundancy in the samples here would have been to create a base class that contained common methods and properties. You may have also wondered about how scalable some of the components are. Some of the shared object onSync( ) methods simply discard the contents of a data provider and rebuild it from scratch whenever a single shared object slot changes. For small shared objects, that works well, but for large ones, it may not.

Many other improvements to and uses of components are explored in later chapters. The next chapter describes how to modify and write your own communication components that work with Macromedia's communication component framework. Chapter 15 looks at components in the context of application design, including adding a recording/playback framework as well as improving component performance in response to shared object updates. Chapter 16 looks at multi-instance applications and how components can support multi-instance designs. Finally, Chapter 18 looks at integrating authentication and role-based authorization into components, which could be used with a VideoConference component to allow only the moderator to adjust the microphone gain of another participant.