I recently finished another article for ColdFusion Developer's Journal (September 2004 issue) that discusses the pros and cons of Flash Remoting and Web Services. This article was inspired by a development project at work where we re-wrote our portal in Flash over a six week period. Let me tell you what a huge task that was and you can read more about it when I get the blog entry posted. Back to the article, it's a brief overview of the two approaches and I recommend reading it if you're investigating Web Services or Flash Remoting for your project.
When it comes down to it, Flash Remoting outperforms Web Services when dealing with complex objects and large datasets. Obviously Flash Remoting isn't free, unless you're a ColdFusion developer....why wouldn't you be? I can't go into full details about the article but I will post a link to it once it goes live. You'll probably only get the first couple of pages and then they'll ask you to subscribe on-line. Or please feel free to purchase a copy of the print magazine at your local Barnes and Noble. If you're like me then you probably won't care about the article and just want an example and source code....
File Browser Example
File Browser Source Code
Enjoy!
This has nothing to do with anything technical but it's definitely worth blogging. Our next door neighbors have a huge oak tree (I think it's an oak) in their front yard. A few weeks ago we noticed some people looking up into it, pointing, and talking. I thought there were possibly owls, talking monkeys, or tree gnomes living in it. It turns out there's this huge bee hive with probably a thousand bees living in it.
I don't really know much about bee hives but it appears to be inside the tree. The bees are just stuck to the tree and it looks like they're gnawing away at it. They cover about a two square foot area around a hole in the tree and it looks like this part of the tree is moving. They're not really swarming around the tree as much as they're just moving around the hole in the tree. Every now and then a bee leaves and comes back. I have no clue what they're doing but I think it's time to call a beekeeper!
Click here to check out the bee video. You need Flash Player 6 or higher to see it. Once you start viewing the video you can move your mouse over the bar (under the video) to display different controls.
Many thanks to my buddy Brent Evans @ Holland Simpson for sending me a GMAIL invite. I signed up today and the interface is very Googlesque, minimal yet very intuitive. There's even what appears to be push technology. When an email arrives, it's pushed to the browser without having to manually refresh. Or this could be a polling technique that checks for messages every so often. After I reverse engineer the client then we'll know ;)
This really isn't a big deal as much as it is suprising. If you import your ActionScript class on "Layer 1" and then make reference to it in "Layer 2" it doesn't work. Given, you should always reference your class in the same frame and layer it was imported on. But I was playing around with referencing classes in AS2.0 and stumbled across this funky little tidbit. It's definitely not a show stopper but very interesting nonetheless.
As you're most likely aware, the new MM V2 components are great but they are a bit bulky. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining because I use them all the time....but, they do introduce a good bit of overhead when using them in applications. So this is just a quick note you might aready know but it provides a 15kB file savings when using Web Services.
I've been using the WebServiceConnector component but coding all my service calls and callbacks. So, in it's simplest form they look like this:
import mx.services.*;
var ws:WebService = new WebService("http://url/service?wsdl");
var wsResult:PendingCall = ws.getData();
wsResult.onResult = function(re:ResultEvent):Void {
// data returned successfully
}
wsResult.onFault = function(fe:FaultEvent):Void {
// error retrieving data
}
It turns out they I can just import the WebServiceClasses since I don't need the functionality of the WebServiceConnector component. The WebServiceConnector component adds about 40kB to your application while the classes add only 25kB. If you want to add just the classes then go to:
Window > Other Panels > Common Libraries > Classes
Every little bit helps!