Flash MX 2004, Web Services, and ColdFusion MX 6.1

Abstract

In this chapter we show you how to use Flash MX 2004, web services, and ColdFusion MX 6.1 together to build Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The web services features in Flash MX 2004 are brand new to this release and come with some great components and classes that allow developers to code minimally, but also have a lot of power and flexibility. In short, a web service is a way of exposing data between technologies in a platform-independent format that is lightweight and seamless. The details of how it is done are hidden to the developer. Web services are platform-independent because at its most basic level, a web service is XML. XML is stored in a text file so, as long as a technology can read a file and have a XML parser, the data is independent of any proprietary platform. Other technologies, such as ASP.NET, Java, PHP, and many others, all have the capability to generate web services that both ColdFusion and Flash can use in applications. This is accomplished by another standard, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). SOAP is a wrapper that uses XML to describe data that is to be shared between technologies. Because SOAP is a standard, many technologies include parsers, much like the XML parser, to read in the data and produce native objects out of that data. These native objects would be a generic object, array, string, number, date, Recordset, user-defined object, and so on. The following example illustrates the process: 1. Flash makes a web service call to a ColdFusion CFC for a list of users. 2. The CFC generates a SOAP document that describes an array of user structs. 3. Flash receives the SOAP document, parses it, and creates an array of user objects that Flash can use.