Tom Muck

Tom Muck is coauthor of six Macromedia-related books including O'Reilly's Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide, and the bestseller, Dreamweaver UltraDev 4: The Complete Reference. He is an extensibility expert focused on the integration of Macromedia products with ColdFusion, ASP, PHP, and other languages, applications, and technologies and is a founding member of Community MX (http://www.communitymx.com). When not in front of the computer, Tom works on his Hong Kong movie collection. Once an aspiring heavy-metal musician, Tom is now content in his old age to sit on the porch playing the blues on his harmonica and banging out Robert Johnson songs on his beat-up acoustic guitar.

Excerpted from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/1183

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Copyright © 2003 O'Reilly Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide
By Tom Muck
September 2003
ISBN: 0-596-00401-X
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/flashremoting/
Available from booksellers or direct from O'Reilly Media, www.oreilly.com.

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This content is excerpted from the above-named O'Reilly publication, with permission, by agreement with ActionScript.org.

I've isolated the sections in this chapter into 10 items that you should remember when building your Flash Remoting applications:

  • Clearly separate the tasks for the application.

  • Clearly separate and optimize the functionality between client, server, and database.

  • Handle server downtime (lack of a connection) gracefully.

  • Use components wisely.

  • Maintain a clean API.

  • Optimize your loops and other code blocks that are executed repeatedly.

  • Use OOP or OOP concepts when possible.

  • Use broadcasters or callback functions in your responder objects.

  • Take advantage of incremental recordsets in ColdFusion.

  • Cache objects from the server whenever possible—on the client using a cache object or on the server using cachedwithin in ColdFusion or whatever caching functionality is at your disposal.

Wrapping Up

In this chapter, you learned some new techniques that will improve your Flash Remoting application development. Following best practices in your applications can make both the time you spend coding and the time your user spends browsing much more productive. For more information on best coding practices, see the resources cited in Appendix B.