Remoting: More Than Just a Name

Flash Remoting is a technology that resides on the remote application server ”hence the name. It acts as a gateway to the server and translates client calls from a Flash movie into calls that the server can understand. It is included with ColdFusion MX Server and JRun 4 and offered as an add-on for ASP.NET and J2EE-compatible servers, such as IBM WebSphere. Third-party developers have built versions for PHP and Perl as well.

Prior versions of Flash were able to communicate with a server in a limited fashion using name/value variable pairs or XML. Flash Remoting offers the following advantages over these methods :

A Flash movie, through the server-side Flash Remoting gateway, can call server-side methods directly, not merely pass values or files back and forth.
The client- and server-side XML or name/value parsing required for Flash 5 interaction is virtually eliminated with Flash Remoting, although it can still be used effectively in some situations.
Because the server-side Flash Remoting gateway can communicate directly with the Flash movie, complex objects, such as arrays, structures, and recordsets, can be transferred without serialization/deserialization.

Also, because the server contains functionality that can be accessed directly (such as calling a server-side method by name from within the Flash movie), the Flash code can be more concise . Recordsets can be loaded into Flash movies using a RecordSet object, making it easy to sort and page through results directly from the client browser. In addition, the DataGlue class (part of the client components of Flash Remoting) offers a set of functions that allows you to bind Flash user interface elements to the data. Flash Remoting also offers debugging of client-side code and server communication using the NetConnection debugger and a service browser that allows you to introspect remote services from the Flash authoring environment. With all of these features, web programming has finally come of age.

Throughout this book we refer to recordsets (data retrieved from a database on a server) and client-side RecordSets (the ActionScript class that is used in Flash Remoting). A third term ” resultset ” is used when talking about the java.sql.resultset class in Java.

Flash Remoting makes it a snap to connect to ColdFusion, J2EE, ASP.NET, and PHP applications and the back-end databases that these server technologies support, such as SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Access, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. Using Flash Remoting, you can create sophisticated applications with a clear line drawn between the client-side interface (Flash) and the server-side logic (business logic). The Flash application can be deployed in the browser or on the desktop. Also, the server-side logic need not be tied to a Flash interface: your server-side code does not require any Flash-specific syntax. In addition to servicing the Flash client, the server-side methods of the application can be utilized by other server-side pages supplying HTML content, or even a .NET desktop application.

Flash Remoting, in conjunction with ColdFusion MX, JRun, and other technologies, also replaces much of the functionality of Macromedia's extinct Generator server-side Flash technology. Generator templates are no longer supported, but Macromedia offers a transition path to Flash Remoting. For more information on the transition, go to:

http://www.macromedia.com/software/generator/productinfo/faq/