I want to teach myself advanced flash programming starting from scratch, and need some guidance.

1. How should I go about it?
2. What can I achieve with advanced Flash?
3. Can I do with Flash what I can theoretically do with Java?
4. Can I use Flash to develop smart web applications like Konfabulator widgets that basically depend on the browser to fetch relevant code, and then more or less work autonomously until the browser/container is closed by the user?
5. What are the limitations of Flash as regards to secure and reliable client to server communication?

Thanks a lot for your time and insight!

9/12/2005 5:02:02 AM

1. http://www.actionscripts.org/ should help a lot

4. In order to be able to do smart web applications you are going to need flash communication server. Flash communication server allows the flash files to be streamed rather than downloaded once. The importance is you can then communicate with a mysql database or other code without reloading the page and movie.

5. flash communications server is not secure. it is all sent in unencrypted packets. but it can be setup in ssl to fix this

9/12/2005 8:12:04 AM

Interesting, and thanks for the link.

Any more input from TWW gurus?

9/12/2005 4:08:57 PM

1) Go over to borders and grab one of the Actionscript bibles. You can generally find them massively discounted. I had an incredibly hard time finding real indepth guides and tutorials on the net. Of course this was back in the Flash 4 days, so there might be better resources out there now.

2) Now, pretty much anything short of direct hardware interaction. I've seen 3d engines, physics models, and some swift computational algorithms. Actionscript is still evolving, but it's become a pretty good general purpose OO-styled language.

3) Yes, but it's going to be a LOT slower for anything computational.

4) Yes, but see #3, flash player instances eat processors like tic tacs.

5) Mienutzich covered this one well.

9/12/2005 4:27:39 PM

yeah it's best to get a book for the Actionscript. Here's a site I used a lot to learn what I needed to do. Good luck. Sounds like you want to go farther with this than I needed to. http://www.flashkit.com/index.shtml

9/12/2005 4:33:45 PM

I am thinking in terms of using Flash to provide web services rather than plain eye candy.

Java is good and all, but Flash is truly cross-platform and easier IMO.

9/12/2005 4:34:54 PM

I have three recent Flash Books by Macromedia at home. They are great and come with tutorial CDs. I will sell all three for $15 plus shipping.

PM if you are interested, I'll send you the actual titles. Its how I taught myself.

9/12/2005 5:33:24 PM

As long as you keep the services *fairly* simple and procedural in nature, yea it's a pretty cool alternative.

Just realize that anything you put in a flash file can be decompiled back to the source in a heartbeat. That limits a lot of web services, because of the inherent insecurity of it.

It's really about the same functionally now as Java, though I've been told the initial setup for a big baller OO project can be time consuming (I'm speaking purely on speculation here).

9/12/2005 9:12:29 PM

well, you can decompile Java code just as easily.

I did find a lot of cool Flash based web services on that action script website.

9/12/2005 9:17:05 PM

you can also encrypt the shit out java code

Yea there are some NEAT web apps out there in Flash. I used to have a bunch bookmarked, if I can find them on a backup or run across them again, Ill link ya.

9/12/2005 9:23:27 PM

I might be missing something, but how do you encrypt java applets so that the JVM can decrypt them but you cannot?

9/12/2005 9:30:46 PM

well you can do byte-code encryption. but of course thats pretty easily hacked.

There are a bunch of pretty hardcore obfuscators out there though, like http://www.zelix.com/klassmaster/ that make the byte-code decompilations all but useless.

9/12/2005 10:10:52 PM