Flash Remoting

Macromedia Flash Remoting MX provides the connection between Macromedia Flash and your web application server, making it fast and easy to create Rich Internet Applications. With its powerful yet simple programming model, you can easily integrate rich Macromedia Flash content with applications built using Macromedia ColdFusion? MX, Microsoft .NET, Java, and SOAP-based web services.

We found in our analysis that there was a sizable amount of Macromedia Flash Remoting data sent from the server every time a user visited one of our applications, even if they had been to that application before. The types of data we were concerned about were localized strings and site model data. It was all static data that changes rarely, if ever, so it was a good candidate to be cached locally. We could have cached it using Local Shared Objects, but we didn't, because the data added up to more than 100k and we did not want to be forced to prompt users to allow us to use more than the default amount.

Rather than continue using Macromedia Flash Remoting to retrieve static data, we decided to load this data into our applications as XML, which gets cached in the browser. We modified the NetServices? code that the applications use to send remoting calls to the server to catch requests for static data. Where static data is being requested by one of our applications, the request is automatically redirected to load XML. We also modified the NetServices? code to process returning XML data and pass it on to the application SWF requesting the data. That way, the vast bulk of the work needed to accomplish this change occurred in a single location in our code set.

On the back end, we used ColdFusion? to process these requests for XML. The data returned from ColdFusion? was formatted with a last-modified header such that a browser would think that it was coming from a static text file containing XML and cache it.

It is important to note that our use of XML rather than Macromedia Flash Remoting to obtain static data from the server by no means implies that we are moving away from Macromedia Flash Remoting as one of the core technologies used by macromedia.com. On the contrary, we have found it to be an extremely useful and appropriate technology for passing dynamically generated data to and from the server, such as membership and product registration data, Exchange search results, and data for the main product exchange sections.