Fuel for the War for Flash

There is a fascinating discussion going on at Flashcoders, titled Fuel for the War for Flash. People compare notes on why Flash is still struggling to gain recognition as a development platform and what Macromedia should do to increase the performance of the Flash player so that all of us Flash developers will be employed for life. The most interesting arguments, I think, come from Claus Wahlers. Check it out if you are vested in a future in Flash application and solution development.

 posted by Vera (4/25/2003 08:01:00 PM);

Flashy yellow car

I know this is supposed to be a Flash blog and all, but something happened in my personal life that is so great that I had to post it here: I bought a '99 yellow beetle. And this does actually have something to do with Flash because: I named it Flash. I bet this is the first car named after a software title.

 posted by Vera (4/06/2003 08:07:00 PM);

A simple web service in Flash

Web services are all the rage these days. At least that's what I hear. After reading this tutorial, I dabbled with web services in Flash myself. If you would like to get an idea of what kind of web services are available, take a look around XMethods. Unfortunately, not all of them will work with Flash. It took me a few tries to find that one that does. I ended up creating a little interface that uses a temperature conversion service. It converts Centigrade to Fahrenheit and vice versa. Nothing too impressive or elaborate, but this is just the tip of the ice berg.
All you need to know are the web service's method names and expected parameters. In the case of the temperature conversion service, the methods are ctoF and ftoC. Here is the ColdFusion code generated in Dreamweaver which tells you so:


<cfinvoke
webservice="http://developerdays.com/cgi-bin/tempconverter.exe/wsdl/ITempConverter"
method="ctoF"
returnvariable="ctoFRet">
<cfinvokeargument name="temp" value="enter_value_here"/>
</cfinvoke>
<cfinvoke
webservice="http://developerdays.com/cgi-bin/tempconverter.exe/wsdl/ITempConverter"
method="ftoC"
returnvariable="ftoCRet">
<cfinvokeargument name="temp" value="enter_value_here"/>
</cfinvoke>

In Flash, you call the ftoC method like so:

myService = gateway_conn.getService("http://developerdays.com/cgi-bin/tempconverter.exe/wsdl/ITempConverter", this);
myService.ftoC({temp:your_inputfield_variable});

You then need to create an event method called ftoC_Result that is invoked when data is returned from the server. Check out the .fla for this example to see just how easy it is to connect to a web service. All you need is Flash Remoting, the wsdl URL -- in this case http://developerdays.com/cgi-bin/tempconverter.exe/wsdl/ITempConverter -- and the method and parameter names the web service expects. Unfortunately, since I don't have a dedicated server at home and the server on which this website is hosted does not offer Flash Remoting, all I have to show for myself for now is a screenshot.

 posted by Vera (4/02/2003 10:35:00 PM);

Today at work I installed Flash 4, just for old time's sake. It got me all nostalgic. It felt like visiting an old friend who I hadn't seen in a while. I had completely forgotten that Actions was once a tab on the Frame properties panel, along with Tweening and Labels. Can you imagine? All of the available Actions fit on one popup menu. Remember when you had to call a frame label instead of a function? One thing I couldn't find though is Get Property. Set Property is on the popup menu, but Get Property is not. I could have sworn we had both.

 posted by Vera (4/02/2003 06:10:00 PM);

Souvenir from Flash Forward. But remember: I don't really work at the University of Virginia. And I'm not really German either. But that is my real name.

 posted by Vera (4/02/2003 10:40:00 AM);

You may have heard that Flash Communication Server MX 1.5 just came out. If you want to know all about its new features, check out Phillip Kerman's article at DevNet.

 posted by Vera (4/01/2003 12:30:00 PM);