O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Metadata has the ability to give us context to the media we are dealing with. It also makes for an interesting data source. Using the Flash Platform we can combine information all ready contained in files that you are using along with web services to create an interesting user experience. This tutorial will combine id3 metadata from your mp3's to power an Flickr image search. Our final output will be an AIR application written with Flex Builder 3.

If you have had an opportunity to look at the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) you could see that there is a huge opportunity to do interesting multi-user applications without needing to write all of the server side code. However there is the challenge of how do you control who comes into your application and what they are allowed to do. In addition, keeping your application credentials safe in case your SWF file was decompiled. So as the title suggests you can use a service like Facebook to take care of the users authentication and Flash Remoting for the application authentication.

More and more the idea of having a social experience has become part of what makes the internet a unique experience compared to other mediums. Over time sites have added the ability to share, comment and evaluate information. To deliver things like chat, file sharing or a multi-user game can require a fair amount of work on both the client side and the server side. The Adobe Flash Collaboration Service gives developers a way to create their own multi-user experience, without the need to manage and maintain servers and work with tools that Flex developer are all ready used to using.

At the Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco, Adobe passed out DVD’s of both Flash Catalyst (code name Thermo) and Flex Builder 4 (code name Gumbo). These products together hope to bridge the gap between designers and developers, by giving designers the ability to control the look of the application and then handing off a project ready to be coded by a developer. This tutorial has been created with the version of Flash Catalyst that was distributed during the MAX conference last November. Since this is an early build of the software some features may change and others added before the final release.