Playing with the Who Wants to be a Millionaire web service

Konrad Wulf has created a quiz web service, Millionaire style. You can see a working HTML example of it here. Today I played with it in Flash. Watch the star to see if you got it right or wrong!

The service has five operations:

getRandomQuestion()
getRandomQuestionByDifficultyLevel()
checkCorrectAnswerById()
getCorrectAnswerForQuestionById()
addNewEntry()

In my example, I use the getRandomQuestion operation to pull a question and answer set from the database when the "new question" button is clicked. Then I am also calling the checkCorrectAnswerById operation to see if the selected answer is correct when the "check answer" button is clicked. The getRandomQuestion operation doesn't take any parameters. It returns the following results:

results: MultipleChoiceQuestion (Object)
   id: Integer
   question: String
   answerA: String
   answerB: String
   answerC: String
   answerD: String
   difficultyLevel: Integer

The checkCorrectAnswerById operation expects the following parameters:

params
   id: Integer
   guessedAnswer: String

The value of guessedAnswer has to be A, B, C, or D. The result that is returned is a Boolean:

results: Boolean

My favorite question in Konrad's database is this one:

What are the three building blocks of Web Services?
A. XML, SOAP, WSDL
B. XML, WSDL, UDDI
C. SOAP, WSDL, UDDI
D. HTTP, HTML, Web Browser

Do you know the answer?

I am going to make the source available for this thing soon, but I'm not quite ready yet. Don't blame me for misspellings in the questions - remember, it's a public web service! My Flash movie is merely consuming it.

 posted by Vera (12/30/2003 11:24:00 PM);

Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus

It's Christmas, and everybody is unwrapping presents and drinking egg nog, and that's all great, but let's not forget about the Bible. If we want to get into the true spirit of Christmas, we should all read about Baby Jesus' birthday in the Bible today. I know of at least one member of the Flash community who will most likely be doing that. In fact, here is a picture of his copy of First Bible Stories, wedged inbetween all of his Flash books.



Merry Christmas to THAT!

 posted by Vera (12/25/2003 02:14:00 PM);

CFUG Nordwest

Yesterday I went to the ColdFusion User Group meeting in Düsseldorf, Germany. Kai König had invited me.

It wasn't a formal meeting with speakers and listeners, but rather a discussion group over drinks. I met some really great people, most of which were Flashers as well as ColdFusion coders. This made for some very interesting discussion topics. One person brought to the table the challenge of wanting to create a .cfc which handles shopping cart logic and then being able to swap out the front end between HTML and Flash without it breaking or having to write additional code. The problem was that Flash can't access session variables referred to as this.mySessionVar in the CF code, this being the .cfc. The best solution we were able to come up with was to have one CF function that is called every time the contents or state of the shopping cart changes (caused by both HTML or Flash) and to use SESSION.mySessionVar instead of this.mySessionVar so that Flash may access the session variables.

Kai also made an interesting statement about Flex. He said that Flex/MXML is to Flash what ColdFusion is to HTML. If you understand German, you can read the longer version of his analogy in his blog.

If you're going to be at MXDU in February, be sure to check out Kai's session titled ColdFusion Components From The Ground Up. He definitely knows what he is talking about.

 posted by Vera (12/16/2003 08:12:00 AM);

Interview with Forest Key, Senior Product Manager for Flash

Thorsten Hayer of Lounge 72 has interviewed Forest Key, Senior Product Manager for Flash at Macromedia.

Read the interview.

 posted by Vera (12/07/2003 04:43:00 PM);

Not that anybody is going to miss me but...

I'm leaving for Germany later today and won't be back until December 17th. I may not have anything to report while I'm over there, but we'll see. I might install a trial version of Flash on my parents' computer to show them that yes, my name does appear in the credits. They might like that. But other than that... see you on the 17th!

 posted by Vera (12/06/2003 12:04:00 PM);