Dave, I can understand where you are coming from. Flash has been severely misused with useless intros and I think we all dread the "skip intro" button. With that said, the focus of FlashCFM is to bring developers and designers together to create intuitive components that are easy to update with a nice looking Flash UI. Our site deals nothing with how to create a cool motion tween with static text, but maybe how to create a motion tween with text coming from a DB. We want to utitlize the power of Flash on the client side with the power of CF server.
Anyway, you do not have to worry about communicating only with a query string but just in certain situations. From the IDE, the POST will not work so Flash compensates by using the GET method which produces a query string. There are also known issues with POST and Mac IE 4.5 so you have to use GET. But you do have access to loadingVariables from a CF template that are url encoded or even loading an XML structure and parsing it inside of Flash. There are lots of options besides the query string. Flash can't handle record like CF but you could write your own class that would be able to take data from CF and turn it into a resultset. You can loop through a recordset quite easily using a frame/time based animation that sends an incremented variable to a CF query. You can achieve a table effect with a single clip in Flash and duplicate this clip to display each record in a HTML type table. So yeah there are workarounds but a majority of it can be done. It isn't as easy or glamorous as doing it in CF but it's worth learning by what you can gain from it. ActionScript is another beast and I consider it fairly robust since it took on the ECMA-262 spec. derived from JavaScript. It has the capabilities of creating objects, classes, methods simliar to Java and C++. It also has the power of OOP in that you can use inheritance and polymorphism with your objects and so on. All in all, I think it's pretty advanced for it's first version under the ECMA spec. I think Flash 6 AS will be much more advanced and we'll see what happens. Sorry to ramble and I hope this makes sense. Regards, Dennis -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Dave Cahall Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 12:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Flash and ColdFusion This is kind of what I thought when I looked at the documentation. I think someone has missed the boat on what is actually need. IMHO - You need to be able to communicate between the two without relying on a query string - Flash needs the ability to handle "records" - Flash needs to be able to "loop" through a record set - Flash needs the ability to produce "tables" or formatted data similarly to HTML IMHO - ActionScript is not as robust as it should be given the maturity(?) of the product and MacroMedia could improve that aspect of the product a lot. - Most of the text I see displayed via Flash seems pretty fuzzy. - People concentrate too much on the "glitz" and forget what the user is coming to the site to see and very often drive their audience away. - Unfortunately most of the sites I see that use Flash heavily, are rich on presentation and VERY short on information. And a heck of a lot of that is consulting companies who want to show you how creative they are in providing fancy bells and whistles but have very weak content about themselves and what they have to offer / can do for their clients. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of dennis baldwin Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 10:07 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Flash and ColdFusion Yeah I've messed around with it quite a bit and it's more for tracking WDDX packets and information within the IDE. It's also supposed to simplify the XML send and load process by letting the developer make the method calls and not have to worry about what is going on behind the scenes. It's kinda funny because I was working with a guy named Jesse Monson on his wddxLoader class. He mentioned to me that he spoke with Sim Simeonov (the guy who wrote the kit from MM) about this and the next thing you know MM released the kit. Supposedly, MM is telling people that the kit will not work with CF4.5 but I think it will since there is hack to get XML.sendAndLoad to work with Flash and CF. This is documented in the wddxLoader class. Anyway, you can check out Jesse's work at http://www.ixstudios.com/datax/wddxLoader/. Also, it's differs from Mike Chamber's FlashSQL kit in that it's built on CF custom tags. The FlashSQL kit is a Java CFX which is a little more cumbersome to install and run. I personally think that if you have the basic methods of integration down none of these mentioned components are necessary. I'm not undermining anyones work but simply stating that a good knowledge of Flash and CF integration will do more for you than anything else. Feel free to contact me if your having problems with the connector kit and would like to get it working. The main thing that I've run into is that you CANNOT have any whitespace between the nodes of your packet. Flash will lock and you'll be prompted to abort the script. Regards, Dennis -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Dave Cahall Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 12:09 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Flash and ColdFusion Has anyone messed around with the new Connector Kit? Is it really necessary and what does it contribute? How does it really differ from the SQL Component Kit the guy from Figleaf developed? -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of David Grant Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 11:00 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Flash and ColdFusion Hey Dennis- I've been to your site a few times, good to know you're in Dallas and in the CFUG! I do some CF/Flash integration, and I should be entering a piece in the Macromedia CF/Flash contest this month. Are you doing anything towards that? Take it easy David Grant -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of dennis baldwin Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 9:27 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Flash and ColdFusion Dave, Thanks for the plug. I also want to add that I have a huge passion for integrating Flash and ColdFusion but couldn't have taken it this far without our users. As many of you know the CF user community is incredible in what they give back to us. We just launched the new site this past Friday and have received a great amount of positive feedback from the community. If you're interested in this type of integration please feel free to join up and hollar at me if you have any questions. Thanks again Dave and I'm working on that tutorial for you ;) Regards, Dennis -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Dave Cahall Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 11:35 AM To: DFWCFUG Subject: Flash and ColdFusion Thought I would pass on a link to another site that some of you might find very interesting and helpful if you are trying to interface ColdFusion with Flash. www.flashcfm.com BTW: The main guru behind the site lives right here in Dallas and his name is Dennis Baldwin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - This email server is running an evaluation copy of the MailShield anti- spam software. Please contact your email administrator if you have any questions about this message. 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