Waldo Smeets .com

This week I have been speaking a lot about Flash Remoting in public. Everyone liked this functionality to connect between Macromedia Flash and a web application server. Yes, you read it correct… “a” web application server because Flash Remoting is not something unique for ColdFusion MX and JRun 4.

It’s not? No, we recently announced Macromedia Flash Remoting MX for Microsoft .NET Framework and Java technology based application servers. This brings the Remoting functionality to those platforms too and I mentioned this several times during my presentations.

Some people I spoke to thought that this means that they still had to code ColdFusion on their own server, but that is a mistake: you can code in the languages that you have been using on that application server before, and the Remoting Server works as a layer in between to make sure that you can approach the server side functionality from within Flash MX.

For example: Here’s a quick overview of using Flash Remoting with .NET from it’s documentation.

To use Macromedia Flash Remoting with Microsoft .NET, you use the Flash Remoting custom server control. You can use server controls in Microsoft ASP.NET pages or you can bind the data defined by Active Data Objects (ADO) to server controls. In addition, you can use .NET web services with Flash Remoting. Like other .NET applications, you can use any programming language that .NET supports, including C#, Visual Basic .NET, and JScript. The following table contains the data types that you can pass between .NET and ActionScript (First: ActionScript data type, Second: .NET data type):

Number (primitive data type) – double;

boolean (primitive data type) – bool;

String – String;

ActionScript (AS) Object – Hashtable;

AS Object – Hashtable;

null – null;

undefined – null;

Ordered array – Array;

Named array – Hashtable;

Date object – DateTime;

XML object – Hashtable;

RecordSet – DataView/DataTable;

So, Flash Remoting is available to you too, even if you are not a ColdFusion developer!