Programming Flash Communication Server

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

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

Summary of Communication Components

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many other components rely on the connection it establishes. See “Forgoing the Sim-

pleConnect Component” at the end of the chapter for how to notify other compo-

nents of a connection without using the SimpleConnect component.

Here are some guidelines to help you understand the following sections on the indi-

vidual components:

• The corresponding client-side ActionScript class for a FlashCom communica-

tion component has a name of the form

FCComponentNameClass; for example,

the class name of the AudioConference component is FCAudioConferenceClass.

• Most of the communication components have parameters that can be config-

ured in the Properties panel or the Component Inspector panel. If there are

parameters that are configurable through the UI for a component, we cover them

in the description of each component. All component parameters can also be

configured using ActionScript properties of the component as noted. For exam-

ple, the LatencyThreshold parameter of the ConnectionLight component is con-

figurable using the component’s

threshold property. Some component

parameters are configurable only via ActionScript, such as the

username property

of the Chat component. It is up to the component developer to determine which

properties of a component are exposed in the Properties panel or the Compo-

nent Inspector panel. The communication components’ parameters can be

exposed in the Component Definition dialog box (available by right-clicking or

Cmd-clicking the component symbol in the Library). For any component writ-

ten in ActionScript 2.0 (AS 2.0), such as the Flash MX 2004 UI Components,

parameters can also be exposed by defining inspectable properties in its .as class

file. The Macromedia communication components are not written in AS 2.0;

therefore, configurable parameters can’t be exposed to the UI via their .as files.

• Unless otherwise specified, the component does not include (nest) any other

Flash UI components (see Table 2-1). If a component does require other compo-

nents, they will be included with the Flash movie automatically.

AudioConference

The AudioConference component enables two or more users to communicate with

each other by subscribing to one or more audio-only streams. Each user who wants

to publish an audio stream must have a microphone that is compatible with Flash

Player 6 or higher. The interface of the component (see Figure 2-2) displays all the

connected users. It allows each user to click a Talk button to start sending the audio

stream, or the user can select an Auto checkbox wherein the component automati-

cally starts and stops an audio stream when the user begins or stops talking. When a

user is talking, a light to the left of the user’s name turns green. When the user stops

talking, the light reverts to gray.