Acknowledgments

Although I've written several books dealing with Macromedia tools, this has been the most difficult, due to the cutting-edge technologies being used. When we first began , Flash Remoting was available only for ColdFusion, with ASP.NET and Java versions in beta. Now, open source projects are springing up that utilize the AMF format and the Flash Remoting interface for PHP, Java, and Perl.

There are several people who have to be thanked for their generous contributions to the text and code contained in the book. First and foremost, my editor, Bruce Epstein, has gone above and beyond what is the norm for editing a book in this field. He seems to live and breathe for the sake of the books he edits, and has substantially improved the text through constant suggestions, comments, and revisions. Thanks Bruce!

Thanks are due to everyone at O'Reilly who contributed to the publication of this book, including the production editor, Genevieve d'Entremont; Brian Sawyer, who proofread the book; and Julie Hawks, who produced the final index. Likewise, my thanks to Rob Romano for creating the figures from my napkin sketches and for enhancing the screenshots.

The book was started by two of Macromedia's employees : Mike Chambers (Flash Community Manager) and Christian Cantrell (Server Community Manager). Parts of Mike's Chapter 1 still remain , as do parts of Christian's Chapter 5. They provided the seed that started the book.

Several other authors have greatly enhanced the book. Alon J. Salant, a Java expert at Carbon Five (http://www.carbonfive.com) who is known for the ASTranslator project, wrote Chapter 7. Joel Martinez wrote Chapter 8 covering ASP.NET based in part on a draft from Jason Michael Perry. Branden Hall, a well-known Flash guru and co-author of Object-Oriented ActionScript (New Riders), contributed Chapter 9. Devon H. O'Dell contributed PHP examples in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. Thanks to all five of these gentlemen for making this a well-rounded book.

The book went through several rounds of technical editing to ensure the accuracy of the content. I'd like to thank all of the tech editors who added their comments and improved the book: Marc Garrett, Ray West, Massimo Foti, Sham Bhangal, Joel Martinez, Alon J. Salant, Devon H. O'Dell, Joey Lott, Chafic Kazoun, Jesse Warden, and Robin Debreuil. A special thanks to my usual writing partner Ray West, who was putting together Community MX and organizing several TODCON conferences while I wrote this book. Ray is a good guy and a great partner.

On a personal level, my family has always provided the inspiration for me to keep writing. My wife Janet is the best partner I could have. If this were a novel and I had written a character as a representation of my dream girl, she would be it. Her constant encouragement throughout the process kept me going even when the workload was overwhelming. My daughter Amber has taken a strong liking to Flash and helped with a lot of the visual aspects of Flash that would have completely escaped me had she not been there to help. Thanks Janet and Amber.

Tom Muck

Fairfax, VAJuly 2003