On Thursday, August 29, 2002, at 07:18 , S. Isaac Dealey wrote: >> Anyone making use of Flash MX for web application interfaces?
Yes, the new macromedia.com site will use Flash extensively for the interface. It will be an enterprise-class Rich Internet Application, built with Flash MX, Flash Remoting and ColdFusion MX (with a little bit of Java in the back end). > In the long-run, however, I would not recommend using Flash the way I've > traditionally seen it used, to build the entire front-end for a site as a > single movie peice. Because a single large movie is slow to load? We're working with full-screen Flash interfaces and we do it by breaking the movie into a shell and several modules which the shell loads. This makes the interface feel much more responsive and it's very flexible. This also allows sharing of resources and functionality between the modules (obviating the need for JavaScript to assist communication between movies) . That said, we also still have 'leaf pages' to display big documents - Flash is not intended for rendering HTML documents - but we try to minimize the jumping between idioms by maintaining navigation in Flash, even on the leaf pages (reusing the exact same module we load into the full screen shell). Flash MX movies can also take advantage of Local Shared Objects to retain state information and communicate between each other, as well as using Flash Remoting to talk to server-side components that can manage session. > largely because of the labor intensive nature of developing Flash, It's true that Flash MX development is still pretty time-consuming. The MX authoring environment, with drag'n'drop components, helps here but it still has a ways to go to catch up with the speed of plain HTML development. > I would expect those times and costs to increase geometrically if not > exponentially as the size and scope of a contiguous Flash movie ( single > movie interface ) increases. We've not found that to be the case. > If ActionScript were as well documented and as > easy to manipulate as cfml or javascript, I'd see no reason to not go > whole > hog on it. Maybe in a few years it will be. :) AS is very well documented and very powerful - in the MX release, pretty much *everything* is scriptable. > Quick question for any Flash gurus who might be on the list: How easy > would > it be to simulate a frame or an iframe in Flash MX? How many hours would > it > take to get it to navigate to any dynamically provided url, grab another > flash movie from that location, and embed the contents of the movie in the > specified container? That's pretty straightforward stuff. I could probably figure out how to do it in a few hours (or I could ask one of our Flashers here to build it in a few minutes I expect!). "If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Margaret Atwood ______________________________________________________________________ Structure your ColdFusion code with Fusebox. Get the official book at http://www.fusionauthority.com/bkinfo.cfm FAQ: http://www.thenetprofits.co.uk/coldfusion/faq Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
