This rather comprehensive chapter gave you an in-depth look at how Flash Remoting makes life easier for you and builds on the skills developed in Chapter 9, "Flash Remoting." This is accomplished by building, in Flash MX 2004, an application whereby the members of the Oakbridge Community Center can book one of the sports facilities offered by the Center online.
We started the chapter by reviewing how we planned the project, the metaphor we settled on, and how we used Freehand MX to visualize the final look of the booking facility.
We reviewed how to plan the data and how that plan fit into the data dictionary we have been using throughout the book. With the dictionary completed, we showed you how to add a table to the MySQL database being used for the center that incorporates the data requirements of the dictionary.
We then showed you the advantages of writing an ActionScript page for Flash in Dreamweaver MX 2004. The chief advantage is accessibility to the code if things go wrong. We then carefully reviewed all the code to be written and gave you a few programming pointers. This code will be called by the final .swf file.
With the code written, we next paid attention to how a database is connected to a Flash movie. This is the job of a ColdFusion MX Component (CFC). We explained what a CFC is and how a CFC works. We then reviewed the creation of the CFC document in Dreamweaver MX 2004.
The coding is the hard work. The easy stuff is actually building the booking application in Flash MX 2004. The first thing we showed you was how to have Flash "call" the ActionScript written earlier, and as you saw, it is one very simple line of code.
We then built the calendar using a drawing created in Freehand MX. We showed you how the key to the application is a ComboBox component in the Components Library of Flash MX 2004, which pulls the names of the facilities in the database into a pop-down menu in the interface.
We also showed you how the use of a movie clip in the Library is what enables the user to reserve a time. We finished the chapter by adding the date and navigation buttons to the application and covering how to place the resulting .swf file in a Dreamweaver MX 2004 page.
Next up is a rather short chapter that shows you how the booking facility can be used in Director MX.