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by Wolf Paulus.
Original Post: Flash
Feed Title: Wolf's Web Journal
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For the last couple of days I have taken a closer look at everything Flash. I always liked the ideas and products that Jeremy Allaire brought to Marcomedia. However, I never really understood what they wanted with JRun, but then again, being deeply rooted in the Java-world, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about Macromedia.
A couple of weeks ago I learned about Macromedia Flex and suddenly it all began to make sense. BTW, browsing through the info for investors you can find out that about 20% of Macromedia's revenue already comes from server related business.
There are quite a few things currently happening on planet Flash. I think, and good way to classify the different projects in by looking where and when the source code is compiled (if at all that is).
Conventionally, using Macromedia's powerfull Flash MX 2004 IDE one would create a *.fla file, publish (compile) it into byte-code and make it available on a Web server for download. Here, compilation happens on the designer's workstation at design-time. To make the result more dynamic, template-related technologies are available that fill in certain data-fields at runtime. Macromedia's Generator and JZOX's JGenerator are good examples.
Using Macromedia's new Flex presentation server, the Flash UI is described in XML. The XML descriptor would be compiled on the server at the 1st request (just like a JSP is compiled). Another product that would fall into the same category - presentation server that generates the Flash movie on request - is Lazslo.
The pure XUL approach is to not compile at all but interpret an XML descriptor on the client-side and instantiate Flash objects accordingly. As far as I know ZULU is the only project championing this solution.
A flash movie (the *.fla file) is pretty much what the *.java file is for us Java coders. Replace compile with publish and *.class with *.swt and you feel right at home, well almost. On planet Flash the Virtual Machine is called FlashPlayer and programming is done in ActionScript, which looks like JavaScript on steriods, allows for OOP and has among other things an XML parser built-in.
Communication with a remote server can accomplished by requesting an XML document via an HTTP GET or POST, or by using Remoting, a kind of Remote-Procedure-Call employing the proprietary, binary Actionscript Message Format (AMF).
Neither of the so far mentioned products and projects are free or open source. However, there is the OpenAMF Project, a free open-source Java alternative to Macromedia's Java Flash Remoting. It is as capable of providing application services to Flash MX as Macromedia`s proprietary soluti
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A gateway servlet lets you map ActionScript to Java objects - pretty cool.
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