Breeze Article

Developing Your First Application with Adobe Connect Professional

Adobe Connect Professional, formerly known as Macromedia Breeze, offers a powerful set of communication tools for Web conferencing, collaboration and training. You use Adobe Connect Professional to create a rich communication experience for everything from product training to customer out reach and more. To stay competitive, your customers and partners will expect the great experiences they see on the Web created through the use of Flash video, Flash movies and VOIP. Adobe Connect Professional supports all of these technologies to help users not in the same office feel as if they are sitting right next to each other.

Companies that use different technologies as part of their communicaiton infrastructure know the true value of powerful integration. You may use the Connect product to provide training for new employees, for example, using the Web conferencing component for an interactive orientation experience and following that up with highly effective courseware. Integrating Connect with your HR system would allow you to automatically enroll new employees in the orientation and courses. You could also display a list of daily web seminars on your company intranet portal. Integrating applications creates huge benefits for your end-users.

Adobe Connect Professional web services are powerful and robust, allowing you to retrieve significant information about your users and perform important functions, such as creating new users and enrolling them in courses. Just how robust are these web services? If you are looking at any page in Connect, you can create an application using available web services that display the same data and offers users the same functionality. You could automate processes across multiple enterprise applications saving your company time and money.

The first step toward integrating with Connect is understanding how to develop an application that uses XML web services. This article shows you how to create a simple application that displays the current meetings for a user. You will learn how to manage authentication, call a web service, and display the results in a browser.

You should think about the following before you begin:

• This article discusses the major points for developing the application. This should be enough for you to create a successful web application. Sample files are included in case you're unsure or need to see more of the code.
• This is probably obvious but you should be familiar with Java, XML, HTML, and JSP pages before you start. Odds are you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't have a base understanding of any of these topics, but you may want to review your knowledge before getting too far.
• Don't test your application against a production system if at all possible. Try to set up a development server that is not used for business-critical meetings and courses. If this is not possible, use your own login and password and avoid letting your application run unmonitored. You should be fine and will hopefully not bring your business server to a halt by running an infinite loop that creates meetings.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to meet the following conditions, as well as use the following software and files:

• Access to a server that you may safely use to develop your application.
• Using the Connect Enterprise Web Services guide.
• A Java IDE that and a recent version of the JDK. I am using JDK 1.4 though this application should work with JDK 5.0 as well.. Eclipse is my IDE of choice.
• A Java-based XML parser that supports the SAX and DOM APIs and the XPath expression language. You really just need a strategy for parsing XML documents which can be satisfied with most XML parsers, such as Xerces or JDOM.

• my_first_breeze_app.zip (7K) contains files to build a web application to log in to the server and display a list of meetings.

Prerequisite knowledge

You should have a solid grasp of the Java programming launguage and be familiar with XML and web services.

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