Understanding the Macromedia Flash Communication Server in Java

Printer Code 128 in Java Understanding the Macromedia Flash Communication Server

The Macromedia Flash Communication Server provides a similar functionality as Macromedia Flash Remoting; the primary difference between the two is in the design In the Macromedia Flash Communication Server design, rather than talking directly to an application server, the Macromedia Flash client talks to the Macromedia Flash Communication Server, which in turn talks to the ColdFusion server You can find out more about the Macromedia Flash Communication Server in Book V, 10 If you re interested in finding out more about how and when to use the Macromedia Flash Communication Server, you should check out

Macromedia Flash Communication Server: Use Cases and Feature Overview for RichMedia, Messaging, and Collaboration, a white paper written by Jonathan Gay and Sarah Allen, the engineers who built the product You can find this paper in the ColdFusion support documentation area of the Macromedia Web site at wwwmacromediacom/desdev/mx/flashcom

The other integration point between ColdFusion and Macromedia Flash is in ColdFusion s charting tools The default file type for charts generated using the <CFCHART> tag is fla You can also choose to have the files generated as JPEG and PNG files At present, if you select Macromedia Flash as the format, ColdFusion does not animate or otherwise take advantage of Flash animation in the generated chart

1: Introduction to Contribute 2 733 2: Basics for Contributors 747 3: Contribute 2 Administration 773 4: Contribute 2 and Other Macromedia Products 803

or many big Internet and intranet sites these days, Web development experts are the ones who author the site (that is, they design it and build it from scratch, or at least set up its basic framework) After a site is established, it may then need to grow and change which in the past meant calling in that handy Web development expert again to update a Web site Now, however, people more familiar with the content that needs to go on the site than with the vagaries of Web development are being asked to take on the responsibility of updating the original pages or adding new pages based on existing designs The original version of Dreamweaver was built to enable people to create and modify Web pages without having to learn the boring ins and outs of HTML The funny thing is, the new-and-improved Dreamweaver MX 2004 has become so powerful as an authoring tool that it s too complex and intimidating (and expensive!) for non-experts who simply want to maintain an existing site So what s a non-expert to do Read on to discover the answer

When Dreamweaver is too much, Contribute is just right Contribute is designed especially for people who must contribute to an existing site but don t need or want to know how to develop a site from scratch Contribute is streamlined to make Web page production as simple as possible, which means there are many things the application can t do, such as editing the HTML making up the page For those kinds of tasks, you definitely still need Dreamweaver Table 1-1 offers a list of some common Web page tasks that each application can be used for

Table 1-1

Creating a new page from scratch Creating a new page from a Dreamweaver template Creating a Dreamweaver template Viewing and editing the underlying HTML code directly Adding, deleting, and modifying text and tables Adding and deleting images Creating DHTML navigation bars Adding, modifying, and deleting behaviors (such as JavaScript button rollovers) Creating and modifying framesets Modifying content (such as text and images) within frames Creating forms Creating and editing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Applying CSS styles to text Uploading and downloading Web Pages to/from a remote server

As you can see, there s quite a bit of overlap in the capabilities of the two applications, but the more complicated tasks are best accomplished using Dreamweaver