In re RIA, esp with Flash MX 2004, I must say that it's a bit of a love/hate thing. If you want to create the interface the way most texts describe (including Nate's) then you'll end up doing this binding of the XML data to the component in question. That's all well and good, but it forces you down a particular path and it forces you to use the IDE to do all the binding etc. Very, VERY hard for someone else to walk in afterwards and be able to see what you've done. If you want to do it all in AS2.0, which is what we are shooting for, then it's a lot more effort because more of the stuff has to be done by hand if you want, say, your XML to be how *you* want it, rather than how Flash wants it, and even at that, the documentation is in about a million different places and there are many, many inconsistencies. You pretty much have to just learn them all as you go, so instead of being "supported" by the language and IDE, such as with Eclipse etc, you instead are fighting at the very times you need it most (when you need hints or etc.). I see this as more of a problem with the IDE than of with Flash MX 2004 itself.
Oh and here';s another thing with how Flash likes its XML : Watch out with an element that has only one sub-element in it, such as if you return data that has only one record in it. Depending on the component and/or object, it will sometimes think it has zero records in it. And other times it will work fine.
All the stuff will hopefully be addressed by MM, but we're on month 3 of a problem that should have taken two weeks to build, and even so we've compromised a lot of what we wanted to do simply because we're now trying to just shove this out the door. Someone, somewhere will eventually just re-write the components from scratch without having to support the legacy methods and habits from earlier versions of Flash, and then things will progress better.
Personally, I just wish MM had included some ability in the IDE to toggle "use this set of components which are backwardly compatible with earlier versions" versus "use this other set of components which are built from ground up but wont work with earlier stuff". That way we could get all the new stuff without all of the enforced compatibility compromises.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Earl, George" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "CF-Talk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 1:48 PM
Subject: RE: Flash for Developers/Programmers WAS: Flash Remoting
> Bryan said:
> > I'm just
> > scared to death to pick up flash, because I have a feeling
> > that the simple things that take moments to do in html will
> > take a huge amount of time or be impossible to do in Flash.
> > For example, allot of my clients love the ability to upload
> > files, download excel spreadsheets, etc. It takes a few
> > moments to plug this into my html apps, however the upload
> > component for flash would need integration. There is no way
> > that I know of to embed the excel spread sheet into the site
> > like I can with IE. The same thing goes with PDF files. How
> > fast can a select box that when you type the results are
> > narrowed. Can you easily highlight a string of search result
> > keywords, etc. All this can be done in Flash if not natively
> > by a 3-party component, but not as quick as can be done in html.
> > . . . snipped a whole lot more . . .
>
> We have just started this very same discussion here and we need to do all of
> those things you mentioned above. We build relatively sophisticated
> reporting applications that use thousands of lines of _javascript_ (with CSS)
> and multiple visible and hidden frames to create the user interface
> experience the users want. It's quickly becoming very cumbersome and more
> complicated than we are comfortable with. So we are starting to think about
> Flash RIA as an alternative. I'd love to hear about others' experiences in
> this area and what people have found to be the best resources for
> researching this approach.
>
> And, pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean by 'a select box that when
> you type the results are narrowed'?
>
> > For example, is it possible to change the
> > flash form look and feel via css? Can I quickly change the
> > entire look of my application from a css file and not have to
> > go in and edit the component code just to change the color.
>
> I went to a MM seminar on the Studio MX 2004 suite and I remember the
> presenter saying (and showing us) that Flash MX 2004 can use the same style
> sheets as your HTML pages. The Flash crowd ooohed and aaahed over that one.
> But I don't know how much CSS capability Flash actually has . . .
>
> George
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
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