Chapter 3. Managing Connections

Before a Flash movie can exchange audio, video, and other data with a FlashCom Server application, it must request a network connection to the server. If an application instance on the server accepts the connection request, a TCP connection is made available to both the movie and application instance to use for ongoing communications. We saw in the preceding chapter that the SimpleConnect component can create a connection. This chapter covers connections in more depth, including how to write custom code to handle various changes in the connection status as well as different error types.

A network connection can be managed within a Flash movie using a NetConnection object. This object's methods are used to request, close, and monitor the status of a network connection. The SharedObject and NetStream classes, as well as Macromedia's communication components , all depend on access to a NetConnection object in order to communicate with the FlashCom Server.