Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide

Preface

The Web has always been an expanding, changing medium. What was in vogue just a few years ago might be completely abandoned today, and what is in vogue today may be completely abandoned tomorrow. Java™ applets were considered a breakthrough technology that was going to revolutionize the Web when they first came out. Java applets failed to take hold for several reasons, chief among them the complexity of the Java language for nonprogrammers, the download size for anything more than a simple applet, and the security restrictions that effectively tied the hands of the applet. ASP was Microsoft’s attempt to replace Java applets with server-side applications. JSP learned from the mistakes of ASP and provided a much more robust solution by offering compiled pages rather than interpreted pages. ASP.NET, in turn, learned from the mistakes of JSP by providing a framework that can be accessible to a variety of different languages using a common runtime environment.

And Flash has learned from the mistakes of those early Java applets. The Flash browser plugin is small, self-contained, and ubiquitous. Flash is attractive to designers as well as programmers, and it provides rich functionality that enhances the end user’s experience. Also, a Flash movie looks essentially the same on a Windows machine as it does on a Macintosh.

Some things have not changed, however. The Web is still primarily based in HTML. Even though XHTML is coming into prominence, it is just a syntactically standardized ...