Building RIAs with the Adobe Flash Platform

The Flash that you thought you knew has changed. It’s grown up.

In this article, I’ll explain some of the technologies that make up the Flash Platform, how they fit together, and how you can use them to build RIAs. Pay attention, because there will be a quiz at the end! The first 200 people to submit their answers will receive a copy of The Adobe Flash Platform ActionScript Reference for Rich Internet Application Development (that’s the print version) delivered to their door for free, thanks to Adobe.

The transformation that Flash has undergone has been occurring for some time, and many developers are aware of it. Every day I hear of a developer building a powerful new application for the Flash runtime that performs tasks like connecting to enterprise solutions powered by SAP or Oracle—and all with the full blessing of those vendors. Flash has evolved beyond the Skip Intro button for which we used to hate it, and has become ubiquitous—helping the browser perform way beyond the text rendering that it was first built for.

It was Macromedia (back in 2002, in their pre-Adobe acquisition days) who coined the term Rich Internet Application (RIA). The introduction of this term coincided with the release of a set of new custom components for Flash MX, thus supplying Flash developers with a set of UI components and providing them with a means to build their own. Flash already contained the ability to make a call to a remote server without forcing a page refresh, but with the release of ColdFusion MX that same year came Flash Remoting, which allowed applications built with Flash to pass serialized data to the server via AMF (Action Message Format).

These two products—custom components for Flash and Flash Remoting—and the synergy that could be experienced by combining them has since been expanded many times in the six-and-a-half years since they were first released. Recently, these technologies have been termed the Adobe Flash Platform. This umbrella term describes a collection of Adobe products, including multiple runtimes, development tools, and servers.

The Flash Runtime

The Flash Player is the cornerstone of the Adobe Flash Platform; it offers the developer a single, cross-platform runtime with all the capabilities of the Internet today. It supports more than just vector animation—it’s also a multimedia player. In fact, the majority of all online video today is delivered via Flash, with the capacity to offer true High Definition video via the same H.264 codec used in Blu-ray.

The runtime can communicate with application servers via web services, HTTP, and remote object calls without the need to perform a browser refresh. Additionally, the player has had VoIP capacity for many generations, and it’s possible to build and deploy collaborative applications with Flash that can include text chat, whiteboarding, and the sharing of desktops across operating systems.

A lot of effort has been invested into making sure that Flash-based RIAs work successfully for the wide variety of devices and operating systems. For example, Adobe and Google together have recently announced the successful implementation and development of a virtual user that Google uses to retrieve text from Flash content; this enables the content to appear in Google’s search results. Adobe is constantly improving the performance of accessibility within the Flash Player and its compatibility with screen readers for the visually impaired. Deep linking and browser history compatibility are features present in the open source Flex framework for Flash applications; these aim to eliminate the kind of navigation problems encountered with dynamic content in Ajax-based RIAs.

Adobe has successfully matured the Flash runtime in the short time that they’ve had it as a product. With each iteration, particularly Players 9 and 10, significant improvements in performance have occurred; Player 10 now offers hardware acceleration for advanced graphical effects. Flash Player 10 also introduces new functionality, including 3D effects, custom filters and effects, advanced text support, and dynamic streaming for improved video performance.

Flash Player 10 is the latest version of the browser plugin; it’s available for Windows, OS X, Linux, and Solaris. Flash Lite 3 is a scaled-down version of the runtime for use on mobile and handheld devices.