I'm going to insert my 2 cents (I thought I did already this afternoon, but for some reason, that email never showed up in the thread).
hank :williams wrote > In my thinking, what would be really good (needed?) is something that > requires some server side code. The idea is that certain urls need to > return data that is packaged along with the html wrapper and the swf. I agree that you would need a server app to deliver html in addition to whatever delivery mechanism your flash app is using (SOAP, XML, JSON, AMF2, etc. over whatever transport). > for example, when a user accesses www.myapp.com <http://www.myapp.com> > it would get the standard html wrapper and swf . But if an app > provides an extended url like www.myapp.com?field=yadayada > <http://www.myapp.com?field=yadayada> then the field=yadayada might be > a signal to provide some specific XML data in the html along with the swf. > > The swf could then also access the same data using the standard > remoting mechanism by reading the application parameters. > > This would allow us to get data into the html and still use remoting > as the primary way of grabbing data from the server. > > The best place for this kind of thing would be in adobe's server > products, FDS and cold fusion. Perhaps it could be done with some > server side sample code. It would require that the developer on the > server side could read the url and easily add XML type data to the > html wrapper. Right now I don't know that I could do this at all with > FDS and I dont know much about cold fusion. Amusingly, in this area, > without using these tools one has much more control of the form of the > wrapper, and writing in a server language like php it might be much > easier. I'm not as convinced that this is a problem that Adobe could solve. Flex and Flash are so open ended, that there are dozens of combinations of server and client technologies that can be used to produce a Flex or Flash (or Ajax for that matter) application. I don't think a single product could be made that would be flexible enough to be used with every possible server side technology (and combination of technologies). This entire thread is really a problem of understanding. If Adobe should do anything to clear this up, they should explain the situation, and let people know that a search engine, which indexes documents, will need some documents to index, and some links to follow to get them. Search engines are not going to be able to index a Flash, Flex, Ajax, Expression Blend, etc. apps, any more than they could index a Windows or Mac OS X app. The solution is to create those html documents using a traditional server side app (php, asp, etc.) and link them up. If you want to move visitors to your web app, either provide a link to the appropriate location in your app (using one of the deep link libraries like unFocus.History - shameless) or kick them over with some javascript location.replace action to that same deep link. Adobe could certainly write an article that would explain how to do that with some examples (they'd have to pick an example server technology like PHP). They have deep link support in Flex, so they could even cover both sides - in perhaps two different articles ;-). Thanks, Kevin N.
