On Flash and HTML:

We are absolutely focussed on establishing Flash as the premier rich client. We think that people building applications will find it very compelling. Its architecture is now better suited to interactive applications and we’re making it much easier than it has been in the past to build these.

However, there will be many applications where Flash is not the client. Obviously basic static content HTML is fantastic, dynamic documents are fantastic. We happened to supply the leading HTML authoring tool in the industry, so we have quite a franchise and commitment there. We expect to see a spectrum of things that people are building. We have a little chart that we’ve built that reflects this.

Matt Brown has a list of Macromedia MX news coverage thus far today.

Mostly positive, with some interesting comments / predictions.

New Flash MX Resources at Macromedia.com

If you have stopped by Macromedia.com today, you probably noticed that we made some new products announcements for ColdFusion MX, Dreamweaver MX and Fireworks MX. Don’t worry though, we still have a lot of new Flash related resources at the Site:

Developer Centers

• Macromedia Flash MX Application Developer Center
  http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/mx/flash/
• Macromedia ColdFusion MX Application Developer Center
  http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/mx/coldfusion/

New Technology : Flash Remoting

• Macromedia Flash Remoting
  http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/flashremoting/

New Tutorials, Articles, Columns, Resources

I have gotten a couple of questions about support for Server Side ActionScript in ColdFusion MX.

• Server Side ActionScript allows you to write server side code in ActionScript / ECMA script (it uses the Rhino parser).
• You can only call this code from Flash MX via Flash remoting (you can’t use it like ASP or CFML).
• There are some built in objects specific to ColdFusion available in the CF object.

I have posted an addendum to my: Getting Started with ColdFusion MX and Flash Remoting article that uses ServerSide ActionScript instead of a ColdFusion component.

When calling remote services / methods via Flash Remoting, any errors that occur will trigger the onStatus method to be called:

onStatus = function(error){
    trace("Error : " + error.description);
}

However, if Flash cannot connect to the server (network or server is down) onStatus will not be called. Using XML and LoadVars you have to manually keep a timer in order to time out the connection, however you do not have to do this using Flash Remoting. Just create a method like the following:

One word of feedback: Bravo!

[davenet.userland.com]

There has been a lot of discussion within the Flash Community concerning calling web services from Macromedia Flash. This seems to have been prompted by google making available a web service for their search engine.
So i thought i would give a quick sneak peek of calling web services from Flash using Flash Remoting. The example linked below calls the google web service to do a search (i’ll let the code speak for itself).

WebForums / Newsgroups

Macromedia Webforums / newsgroups
Were-here.com
UltraShock.com
FlashKit.com

Mailing Lists

FlashCoders
Yahoo Flash
Flash Chinwag
Flash Fusion :: Mailing list for discussion of Macromedia Flash MX / ColdFusion MX integration.

coming soon…

I will be moving in the next month and my new house will probably not have as fast an internet connection as I currently have. Because of the move, markme.com may be offline for a little while, and because of the speed issue the site may be down indefinitely.

I am considering some third party hosting solutions, however, if I go that route I will probably have to re-architect the site which might lead to some additional delays.