Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Flash Power Tools

The following is a brief overview of the different Power Tools that leverage the Flash Player as part of their solution. Each of these tools can be developed for using Flash MX 2004 or Flash MX Professional 2004.

Macromedia Flash Media Server 2 (http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashmediaserver/productinfo/features/)

The Flash Media Server 2 allows Flash movies to have real-time streaming audio and video for collaboration, video on demand, and distance learning.

Macromedia Breeze (http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashcom/)

Breeze harnesses the Flash Media Server 2 and Microsoft Power Point taking online training, marketing, sales, and web conferencing to a whole new level. After installing an add-on to the Flash 6 or 7 Players, users can share desktop applications and control the shared applications of other users over the Web.

Macromedia Flex (http://www.macromedia.com/software/flex/)

Flex is a presentation server and a graphical user interface (known as the Flex Builder) for creating Rich Internet Applications following a standards-based programming methodology. The Flex Builder creates MXML, which can be read and displayed by a Flash movie. For example, an airport’s arrival and departure system could benefit from Flex. The system itself could have a Flash frontend to allow for video advertisements and rich animations, but would require a robust backend with a lot of data communication with the frontend to handle the display of the flight information.