Home / Developer Center / Flash Remoting Developer Center /

Flash Remoting Article

Lucas Sherwood

Every time I show a developer either the Trio site or the Pet Market site, they instantly see the benefit of a rich user interface—they run back to the office and lock themselves away from the world for the rest of the day and night building their first Rich Internet Application (RIA).

Almost without fail, the next day I either get a phone call or e-mail with a very simple question: "How do I get started?"

Rarely are these novice developers; these are usually experienced Internet architects, responsible for building fantastic web applications. But the concepts of Macromedia Flash and Macromedia Flash Remoting are different, and making that first step is hard. Flash Remoting may execute processes in an asynchronous order—processes may not happen in the order that you expect. You must understand this new paradigm in developing your Rich Internet Applications.

Trying to pull apart someone else's application can help you learn, but it assumes that you understand how the developer constructed the application and that the technology the developer used requires no giant leaps of faith. This article gives you a chance to build an application through widgets that outline the major concepts in Flash Remoting. It's written specifically for ColdFusion developers learning to use Flash Remoting.

·	Installing software for this tutorial
·	Understanding the Flash Remoting model
·	Widget 1: getting familiar with Flash Remoting basics and the NetConnection Debugger
·	Widget 2: querying the database and displaying it in Macromedia Flash with DataGlue
·	Where do you go from here?

About the author
Lucas Sherwood is a Macromedia Product Evangelist. He is also quite well known throughout the EMEA ColdFusion community for his rapid-fire presentations on everything from Performance Tuning to CFScript. Lucas is also very active in the MMUG community, presenting at user group meetings when he is in town (any town!) as well as running a global diary for all MMUGs.

Lucas joined the consulting services division several years ago where he was responsible for ensuring the success of many ColdFusion based projects around the world. Lucas is a Certified ColdFusion Developer and currently holds the land speed record for a ColdFusion MX presentation.