Programming Flash Communication Server

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

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

Preface

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xxxi

usually includes the _so suffix, such as people_so. Regardless, constant-width

text can become distracting, so we also refer to it informally as “the people

shared object.” Again, let your context be your guide.

• Many items have related names that take different formatting or use different

capitalization. For example, an instance of the DataProvider class might be used

to populate the

dataProvider property of a DataGrid component. Likewise, the

PeopleList component might be supported by the PeopleList class.

Voice

This book is the combined effort of five authors. While every effort has been made to

ensure uniformity, some differences in voice, writing style, and coding style are inevi-

table. In places, “we” refers to the collective authors, such as in, “We hope you enjoy

this book.” In other places, “we” refers to the reader and the author together, such as

in, “We’ll see how to create a chat application shortly.” In places, the author uses

first-person singular, such as in, “When I test the speed of the Internet connection at

my house, it isn’t as fast as my computer at work.”

This book also follows the O’Reilly convention of alternating gender occasionally

throughout the chapters. “He,” “her,” and “the user” generally refer to the human

participant interacting with a Flash-based UI to access a FlashCom application. The

term “client” usually refers to the Flash Player running in a desktop PC’s browser.

Exceptions are noted when applicable.

Using Code Examples

Keep in mind that there is a difference between the teaching examples shown in the

book and robust, deployment-ready code. Always consult the web site for the latest

and greatest version of a given example.

Source files (including many that don’t appear in the book) can be

downloaded from the book’s web site at http://www.flash-

communications.net.

Package names begin with the path com.oreilly.pfcs.

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the code in

this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact O’Reilly

for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For exam-

ple, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require

permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does

require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example

code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code

from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.