Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide

Implementing Caching

Caching involves maintaining a piece of information in a store or cache to improve performance of an application. In Flash Remoting, you can create objects to hold the contents of a remote service call. This can be handy in many situations:

• An email program that retrieves email messages from a remote server, allowing you to read the messages by choosing a message header in a list. Upon moving to another message, the current message could be cached, so that if you were to return to that message, it would not have to be retrieved from the server again.

• A product listing that has master/detail pages of a product list. As you choose a product, the details page retrieves the product details from the remote server. Upon choosing another product, the current product is placed into a cache for easy access when the user returns to that product.

• A book review application, where a book review is retrieved from a remote service. As the user chooses another book, the current review is stored in a cache, in case the user returns to it. Each subsequent viewing of the book review comes from the cache rather than the remote service.

A cache is typically implemented as an object or an array of objects. Each object represents one item from the remote service. All items are not retrieved, but the cache is indexed in a way that each item that is placed in the cache can be easily retrieved, as in the following code snippet:

// Set up the custom object that holds the product information ...