Programming Flash Communication Server

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Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Preface

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VitalStream focuses on live event and on-demand applications. VitalStream provides

prebuilt applications and services but will not (as of this writing) host custom appli-

cations. For details, see:

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You can find many other providers with different hosting and service plans via a web

search. There are other related products for which you might consider hosted

options. Macromedia offers Breeze Live hosting. The third-party HostMySite.com

(http://www.hostmysite.com) offers ColdFusion hosting, including the latest Black-

stone version of ColdFusion.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Plain text

Indicates menu titles, menu options, menu buttons, and keyboard accelerators

(such as Alt and Ctrl). Submenu options are also indicated with an arrow, such

as File

➝ Open.

Italic

Indicates application names, new terms, library symbol names, function names,

method names, class names, package names, layer names, URLs, URIs, stream

names, email addresses, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, and directories.

In addition to being italicized in the body text, method and function names are

also followed by parentheses, such as setInterval( ).

Constant width

Indicates code samples, application instance names, clip instance names, sym-

bol linkage identifiers, frame labels, commands, variables, attributes, properties,

parameters, values, objects, XML tags, HTML tags, the contents of files, or the

output from commands.

Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be entered literally by the user. It is

also used within code examples for emphasis, such as to highlight an important

line of code in a larger example.

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

xxx

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Preface

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values. Constant width

italic

is also used to emphasize variable, property, method, and function names

referenced in comments within code examples.

This icon signifies a tip, suggestion, or general note.

This icon indicates a warning or caution.

In the interest of brevity, we expect you to understand the following conventions

used throughout all O’Reilly books on Flash and ActionScript. For so-called

instance-level methods, such as connect( ), which are invoked on an instance of a

class, such as NetConnection, we refer to it in the prose as NetConnection.connect( ).

However, in the code examples, you don’t use the class name but rather an instance

of the NetConnection class, such as:

my_connection.connect( )

On the other hand, so-called class methods (a.k.a. static methods) are invoked on

the class itself, in which case the class name is used verbatim, such as:

Classname.methodname( )

The analogous issue applies when referring to instance or class (static) properties.

The difference should be clear from context or the Macromedia documentation for a

particular class.

Once a concept, component, or class has been introduced, we often simplify the lan-

guage for readability. For example, instead of writing “establish a network connec-

tion using an instance of the NetConnection class,” we might simply write “create a

NetConnection to access the FlashCom application.”

When there are multiple names for an item, or nuances as to its meaning, we choose

the most appropriate or convenient one. The meaning should always be clear from

context. Most notably:

• The

client object is technically an instance of the server-side Client class stored

in a variable named

client.

• The

application object is technically an instance of the server-side Application

class.

• Shared objects have two names. One of the names matches the external shared

object file, but without the extension. For example,

people can refer to the peo-

ple.sol or people.lso file. The variable that holds a reference to the shared object