The Authoring Environment

The Flash authoring environment resembles standard software development interfaces familiar to Visual Basic and Delphi programmers. The features specifically advantageous for the Flash Remoting programmer are:

UI components

The built-in Flash UI components allow for drag-and-drop construction of interfaces and easy connection to a data source through Flash Remoting using the DataGlue class. UI components are also extensible, allowing third-party developers to easily add to the core functionality of Flash.

ActionScript code hints and syntax highlighting

The Actions panel (F9) provides lists of methods and properties as you type, as long as you use identifiers consistent with the code-hinting guidelines shown in Table 2-9 later in this chapter. For example, to enable code hinting, include the _mc suffix in the names of movie clip instances.

Object-oriented programming (OOP)

OOP standards and conventions drastically reduce the complexity of a Flash Remoting application when used properly. Flash is ideally suited for object-oriented methodologies, which reduce application development time and allow more complex applications to be built.

Property inspector

The Property inspector is common to the Macromedia MX family of tools and is helpful for naming your objects.

Flash Remoting Components

The Flash Remoting components, which must be installed separately from Flash, are not visual components like the UI components; they include ActionScript classes for communicating ...

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