Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide

The Timeline

Flash’s timeline controls both animation and the order in which events occur in the movie. Flash MX and Flash 2004 use the timeline metaphor, although the latter offers timeline effects to simplify common interactions with the timeline for repetitive tasks. Furthermore, Flash Pro offers a screen-based metaphor that helps disguise the underlying timeline for programmers coming from Visual Basic and similar environments. If you are a programmer unfamiliar with the timeline, you can imagine it as a piece of audio tape. When a musician records a song, the various instruments are recorded on different tracks. The guitar might be on one track, the drums on another, the lead vocals on another, and backing vocals on yet another. There might be many separate tracks of music, but as the tape head glides across the final tape, all tracks are played together, making one cohesive collage of sound.

This is similar to how the Flash timeline works, only the tracks are called layers, and each layer can contain audio, video, animation, or ActionScript code. Also, playback is not continuous like an audio tape, but more like a motion picture, with individual frames that the playback head displays at a typical rate of 10 to 30 frames per second.

That said, a Flash application that acts as an interface to a dynamic web application might not follow these general principles. The movie might have a static interface with several screens that can be displayed. In these cases, the timeline can be used to break up individual screens of the user interface. Each screen can occupy a frame or several frames in the movie and can be displayed in response to a triggering event.

To give you an example, let’s say you have an interface with six main screens: user login, display data, drill down to a detail of the data, update the data, insert new data, and delete the data. Each of these six screens of user interface can each occupy several frames on the timeline with specific starting and ending points. As a particular screen is needed, the playback head can be sent to the starting point on the timeline that begins that particular element, and it will stop at the end of that section. In effect, you have six individual scenes that are meant to be played individually rather than sequentially.

How does the timeline fit into Flash Remoting? Well, the short answer is that it doesn’t. All of your Flash Remoting code can be placed into frame 1 of the main timeline (or the first frame following any preloader) so that it executes and initializes when the movie loads. Your remote methods will be available to all other parts of your movie if you do this.

You can place a stop( ) function in the code to make sure that the movie doesn’t begin playing until all of the Flash Remoting initialization code has executed. Your methods and event handlers can all be contained in one central location on one layer in one frame of the timeline. This isn’t always necessary or even possible, but it is a goal to shoot for when developing your Flash Remoting application.

Tip

If all of your code is self-contained, you can put it into an external .as file and use an #include directive to incorporate it in your Flash movie.