With the advent of Flash Communication Server MX (FCS), Macromedia believes that it’s on the edge of a breakthrough in how people think about the Internet. FCS has been designed to provide web developers with the means to add polished interactive audio and video features to their sites, the sort of features that users have come to expect.

Naturally, the process of efficiently integrating rich media into applications, web sites, and web content is a complex one, to say the least. That’s where Programming Flash Communication Server factors in. As the foremost reference on FCS, it helps readers understand how FCS can facilitate:

• Video on demand
• Live webcasts
• Video chat and messaging
• Shared desktop conferences
• Live auctions
• Interactive whiteboard presentations
• Workflow collaboration
• Multi-user games

Programming Flash Communication Server not only explains how to use the pre-built FCS components to construct a simple application, it also explains the architecture so that developers can program custom components to make even more advanced applications. In addition, the book explains how to truly optimize performance, and talks about considerations for networked applications as well as the media issues pertaining to FCS.

Programming Flash Communication Server gives developers a sorely needed leg up on this potentially intimidating technology. It lets users develop cool web applications ranging from direct dating experiences with real-time video, to pre-recorded corporate presentations, to news services with video and audio, and much more.

At last, the ability to build web sites with rich interactive features--minus the complex downloads and installation hassles--is a reality. And now, with Programming Flash Communication Server from O’Reilly by your side, you can do more quickly and easily than you ever dreamed possible.

Good Job
If you want to understand programming the Flash Communication Server and it’s capabilities this is a good place to start.

Still good for Flash Media Server 2
Although I’m using Flash Media Server 2, this book is still highly relevant as not much has changed. The core objects and language is the same so I would not hesitate to recommend it for anyone looking to use FMS.

Only good resource I’ve found on this subject
This book is intended to show you how to design and build applications that use Macromedia’s Flash Communication Server MX. Together, Flash and the Flash Communication Server (FlashCom) can be used to create an array of applications including virtual classrooms, real-time multiplayer games, media-on-demand services, instant messaging applications, interactive live event broadcasts, video conferencing systems, and more. Macromedia designed FlashCom to simplify developing these types of communication applications.

FlashCom is a real-time communication server. It provides an extensible and customizable platform for developing real-time, media-rich, web-based communication applications. FlashCom takes care of the plumbing required to create networked applications, allowing you to focus on your unique application rather than write code to support network protocols.

As with any technology, as you move away from creating simple applications to creating larger-scale, robust, and secure applications, design and development increase in difficulty. This is especially true in an environment in which events are occurring in multiple Flash movies and on the server at the same time. Coordinating concurrent events introduces an extra level of complexity that many Flash and web developers may not be accustomed to. This book addresses these and other problems directly.

To get the most out of the book, you should have FlashCom Server installed and running on your server or a hosting company’s server. You also should have Flash MX available for client-side development, although you can write server-side scripts in any text editor. Depending on your application, it also is beneficial to have a microphone for audio input, a web cam for video input, and ColdFusion Server MX 2004 or later for Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 14, and Chapter 18, which all make use of CFML code examples. I now describe this book in the context of its table of contents:

Part I: FlashCom Foundation
The first four chapters of the book introduce the Flash Communication Server and the client-side components available to construct applications, such as a video chat. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 go into detail about creating applications and connecting to them.

Chapter 1, Introducing the Flash Communication Server - Introduces the communication classes by using them to build a simple video conferencing application.

Chapter 2, Communication Components - Shows how to assemble applications using Macromedia’s communication components.

Chapter 3, Managing Connections - Covers all aspects of establishing and managing client connection requests and the server response.

Chapter 4, Applications, Instances, and Server-Side ActionScript - Covers server-side application development in detail.

Part II: Audio, Video, and Data Streams
Chapter 5 through 7 focus on the media and data that can be transmitted to and from FlashCom applications and their clients.

Chapter 5, Managing Streams - Offers extensive details on publishing and playing live and recorded streams, including audio, video, and data.

Chapter 6, Camera and Microphone - Provides detailed coverage of the Camera and Microphone classes for managing video and audio input.

Chapter 7, Media Preparation and Delivery - Addresses issues revolving around audio and video preparation to ensure the best user experience.

Part III: Remote Connectivity and Communication
Chapter 8 through Chapter 12 cover communication between FlashCom applications and their clients or communicating with other application servers using Flash Remoting.

Chapter 8, Shared Objects - Offers extensive details on communicating between clients and applications using temporary and persistent remote shared objects.

Chapter 9, Remote Methods - Describes how to use the NetConnection and Client classes to implement remote method invocation.

Chapter 10, Server Management API - Covers the powerful API available to monitor and control FlashCom Server operations.

Chapter 11, Flash Remoting - Explains how to communicate with other applications, such as ColdFusion, to implement features not available to FlashCom directly.

Chapter 12, ColdFusion MX and FlashCom - Builds on the previous chapter and gives practical examples of ColdFusion and FlashCom integration.

Part IV: Design and Deployment
Chapter 13 through Chapter 18 cover building and extending components, application design, scalability, managing latency and bandwidth limitations, and creating secure applications.

Chapter 13, Building Communication Components - Introduces communication component development using the Flash UI components and client-side ActionScript 2.0.

Chapter 14, Understanding the Macromedia Component Framework - Describes how to write components that work with Macromedia’s communication component framework.

Chapter 15, Application Design Patterns and Best Practices - Offers advice on application design, improving component performance, and best practices.

Chapter 16, Building Scalable Applications - Looks at multi-instance applications and how components can support scalable designs.

Chapter 17, Network Performance, Latency, Concurrency - Covers performance tuning to deal with latency and bandwidth limitations, plus addresses concurrency issues and solutions in a networked environment.

Chapter 18, Securing Applications - Looks at integrating authentication and role-based authorization into components, including a ticketing mechanism.

Only good resource I’ve found on this subject
This book is all about the design of applications using Macromedia’s Flash Communication Server MX. FCS MX enables the building of media-rich web applications by taking care of the basic tasks required in the networking of the applications. Thus, you can focus on the application itself rather than worrying about low-level communication details.

Since this book is concerned with situations where multiple Flash applications will be executing on the same server simultaneously, there is going to be considerable effort involved in coordinating events, which is addressed by this book. You should already have FCS installed and running on your server and you should also have Flash MX available on the client. The following is description of the book by chapter:

Chapter 1, Introducing the Flash Communication Server - Acts as an introduction to FCS and an overview of the whole book.

Chapter 2, Communication Components - How the FlashCom communication components encapsulate commonly needed features such as chat, video recording and playback, bandwidth control,and user configuration. These components implement many basic building blocks for your application.

Chapter 3, Managing Connections - This chapter covers connections in more depth past the SimpleConnect component, including how to write custom code to handle various changes in the connection status as well as different errors.

Chapter 4, Applications, Instances, and Server-Side ActionScript - This chapter describes how to write Server-Side ActionScript and work with the objects that control application instances and the Flash movies that connect to them.

Chapter 5, Managing Streams - Offers a somewhat oversimplified but complete example that shows the basic steps in publishing one live stream and subscribing to a second.

Chapter 6, Camera and Microphone - This chapter explains how to use both the Microphone and Camera classes to record live streams. These classes are at the heart of most communication applications involving multimedia.

Chapter 7, Media Preparation and Delivery - This chapter covers many details for compressing and streaming audio and video.

Chapter 8, Shared Objects - This chapter starts an entirely new subject - shared objects, which provide a mechanism for the transmission of data between client and server.

Chapter 9, Remote Methods - This chapter also shows how to broadcast method calls to every movie and application instance connected to a shared object or stream, or send them to and from individual movies using RMI.

Chapter 10, Server Management API - Discusses the Server Management API and its applications, including monitoring a FlashCom Server, gathering statistics on application instances, and managing the log streams.

Chapter 11, Flash Remoting - Demonstrates how Flash Remoting can be used to add data connectivity to FlashCom applications. Flash Remoting can access web services, server-side scripts, CGI applications, XML files, or the local filesystem with the help of an application server such as ColdFusion.

Chapter 12, ColdFusion MX and FlashCom - Teaches some specifics involved in using Flash Remoting with ColdFusion MX and FlashCom. There are some practical working examples shown that demonstrate how you can leverage the benefits of Flash Remoting in conjunction with FlashCom.

Chapter 13, Building Communication Components - This is the first step in building complete applications, and is demonstrated through an extensive example.

Chapter 14, Understanding the Macromedia Component Framework - How to modify an existing component and how to create a new one. Also discusses server-side framework code and its core features and data structures.

Chapter 15, Application Design Patterns and Best Practices - Describes some of the best practices available to application developers. This chapter provides some useful design options, patterns, and best practices that will help you build better applications.

Chapter 16, Building Scalable Applications - Deals with building multi-instance and multiserver applications that don’t bog down as the number of client connections increases.

Chapter 17, Network Performance, Latency, Concurrency - Traditional network design issues affect FCS also.

Chapter 18, Securing Applications - Specifically this chapter examines the three A’s of security - Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting.

This is a great reference.
Excellent book, stuffed of examples very well explained, easy to read and to understand, essential for who desires initiate or even though to profound itself studies on FlashCom.
Obligator reference in projects involving FlashCom, either for fast consultations and advanced tasks.
Excellent approach of subjects as Design patterns and security, yonder a perfect demonstration about audio, video and much more.

A necessity for the bookshelf...
If you’re a developer looking into real-time server communication using Adobe Flash, this book is a must-have. It guides you thru various levels of application development in an easy to understand format, and provides well documented pieces of code to assist you in the learning process of putting together your project:

Topics covered include:

- learning about components and how to use them
- establishing and managing client connections
- publishing live and recorded streams
- local communication with clients
- remote communication with outside applications

The book also shows how to build and integrate your own custom components, and how to scale your application using the components that you’ve created. Other highlights include information on how to use shared objects and server management API, as well as ways to improve both design and performance.

A must-own for FlashCom developers
This is a very well-written book written by many famous FlashCom developers. It does not only give a comprehensive guideline on how to develope FlashCom applications, it also introduces best-practices and design patterns for developers. It also has many useful and real-world examples.

However, I believe this books is between beginner and intermediate level. You must know some ActionScript in order to get into what this book is talking about.

I highly recommend this book for FlashCom developers.

Flash, one step of the future / Flash, un paso al futuro.
This book is simple and clear. Good examples for all the chapters, and you can download from the Internet.
It’s a good choice.

Un libro simple y claro. Buenos ejemplos para todos los capítulos, que se pueden descargar de Internet.
Excelente.

Indispendable
For anyone interested in the exploring or exploiting the power of FCS, this book is indispensable. We have multiple programmers who have been working with FCS for more than two years. We really rocketed into new areas of development once we had the book in hand.

I can’t imagine not having this essential reference and source of ideas.

Excellent and concise book
All you need to know about the server part of the Flash architecture is in this book. It’s relativelly small, brief and clear on its explanations and provides a good background about the creation and development of the Flash Communication Server. I am about to finish it after only a month started reading it, and it was very pleasant to understand all the concepts and techniques behind it. I’ve bought the bible series for the client part, and although they differ in nature, the bible is much more exaustive reading.
I would definetelly recommend it for anyone who’s starting to work with FCS.

Indispensable for developing with FlashCom
Programming Flash Communication Server, Lesser et al., O’Reilly, 2005

Reviewed by Damian Taggart

As far as I know, Programming Flash Communication Server by Brian Lesser, Giacomo Guilizzoni, Robert Reinhardt, Joey Lott, and Justin Watkins is the ONLY thorough reference for creating, using and optimizing real-time communication applications built with the Flash Platform.

This book, in conjunction with the Macromedia Flash Communication server documentation, will empower your development process, giving you all the resources needed to develop and deploy FlashCom web applications with the confidence that comes from having a sophisticated understanding of the how to Flash Communication Server functions.

The book covers Server-Side ActionScript (SSAS) in addition to both ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0 implementations on the client side. Along the companion website (http://flash-communications.net/) and sample applications, you’ll be able to set up and test many proof-of-concept application instances in surprisingly short lengths of time. As stated in the book, much of the code provided will needs some tweaking before you put it into production -- to reflect the vagaries of your particular network and client-base.

I’m not sure I’d recommend reading this book cover-to-cover, as it is 800 plus pages -- but it is divided up in easily navigable, relatively stand-alone sections. Some highlights for the various sections include:

* an introduction to the platform and server architecture
* how to manage clients
* generating detailed server logs and reports
* setting up a surveillance application using Flash
* implementing local and remote SharedObjects
* publishing live and on-demand video
* video conferencing
* and of course, scalability and security in FlashCom applications

This book hasn’t left my desk since I got it and began working heavily with Flash Communication Server. If you’re going to be using the FlashCom platform, you need this book.

A must have reference for FCS
I have been trying hard to read all the chapters of Programming Flash Communication Server but have never been able to finish off all 800+ pages of the book. I have finally finished the reading almost the entire book. Now, that I would rather use the book as a complete reference for Flash Communication Server Application development, its time to write a review! The authors are those whom I have, well we all have, looked upon as the best in the industry, especially with Flash and related technologies. Well before the book hit shelves, I knew that this was going to be *THE* book for Flash Communication Server. With authors like Peldi and Brian Lesser, there can be no mistake in saying that this is the must-have book if you are into application development for Flash Communication Server.

Forward

The Forward by Macromedia’s own Flash Communication Server Architect, Pritham Shetty, starts to show the book’s worth right away. As I finished the Forward, I was already referring to Pritham Shetty as the *Father of Flash Communication Server*. His story of heading the FlashCom team, their study of the market, technologies and finally their decision to come up with a real-time communication infrastructure to take Flash and Macromedia into a new, profitable business in the telecommunication world was not just interesting but very inspiring. Their idea of supporting a range of real-time applications like classroom, company meeting, front door cam, customer service, car race, remote presence led them to implement base features: audio, video or data as streams, real-time and on demand and data synchronization was a tantalizing read. It tickled my brain buds not just for the technical acrobatic stunts but for the innovation that went into the making of this cool software.

That was a simple toy which children can make to create a simple mechanical telephone. Two cans with a small hole in each one connected by a piece of string that is drawn through the hole and secured with a knot inside the can. One kid talks into one while the other listens. If the cans are pulled away from each other so that the string is tight the vibration is carried down the string from one can to the other. Then interestingly enough, I was able to speak a Japanese word for communication which let loose wild ideas and innovations among developers. Shortly afterwards Flash Communication Server was released in September 2002.

If you are interested in the history of Flash Communication Server, then the Forward from Pritham Shetty is a must read. He is literally the man behind Flash Communication Server.

Part I

I have to say sorry that I don’t have much to say about Part I of the book as I skipped over a lot of it. But then here is the short teaser, "If you are new and starting off with Flash Communication Server Application Development, read this part carefully so that you will know what you are dealing with, what each term means where each fits in. It gives gives a good foundation for understanding the remainder of the book, including your first sample application. Bottomline, make sure you skim Part I if you are already familiar with Flash Communication Server; but read it carefully if you are a novice or beginner.

Part II

Once you get cleared with the basics in Part I, Part II treats you to the inner depths about Streams; Audio, Video, ActionScript Data and their related technicalities. This part isn’t that lengthy but gives you subtle insights into Audio, Video and Data Streams. One of the parts which you can take a detailed look is the last chapter on Media Preparation and Delivery. The Media Preparation and Delivery chapter gives us the much needed knowledge, information, tips and tricks for the Flash Communication Server Developers who come from a programming background - more coders than Video/Audio enthusiasts. You will learn details about the various terms, terminology, information about Audio, Video, Codecs, that Constant Bit Rate (CBR) compression is for Live Streaming while a recorded Video Stream can enjoy a Variable Bit Rate (VBR) etc. I could be called an Audio/Video novice but this chapter made me confident about dealing with Flash Video and I’m not kidding here.

Part III

Part III is where the fun begins. The description of Shared Objects at length was really appreciated though I wish (my personal take) that the section on Proxied Shared Objects could be a bit extended and elaborated than just the few paragraphs and one example. Then there are of course chapters on Flash Remoting for Flash Communication Server, and Remote Methods. I am not sure if that was purely intentional to put a small piece of ColdFusion complementing Flash related technologies here; my particular interest was the write-up of a ColdFusion example for an FTP-Server class, and another for Stream Management. That really gave some idea of the possibilities we can do with the combined power of Macromedia Technologies.

The Server Management API chapter reminded me of a funny anecdote when our team first saw the codes of the FlashCom Admin Console that is being used in Flash Communication Server. Some code is present that was authored with the intent of being fault-tolerant and user-friendly, and consequently may not be the best illustration of the most efficient way of writing Flash Applications. Eh!

Part IV

If the fun started with Part III, then Part IV is the climax. As you get down to this part, you are likely to exclaim, "Oooh! Server-Side Components." As I near the later part of the book, I began to think if the chapters were carefully chosen to fulfill the proverbial "keep the best for the last". Get yourself pampered with the chapter on the Component Framework, it is a real treat.

And Ah! the portion on Design Patterns and Best Practices serves well as the spiced Masala just like the much needed condiment of an Indian cuisine. Don’t miss the "delegating updates" and "building facades on the server" sections in particular.

Topics in the "Building Scalable Applications" chapter such as Scalability and Load Balancing was one topic which I am sure everyone will find valuable - especially after reading how many people have had to come up with their own Flash Communication Server Load Balancing solutions. I would like to thank the book authors again here, the book came as a boon just in time for a project our team was involved with.

The book finally closes its chapters with some good information on Network performance (latency and bandwidth), and the three As of securing a Flash Communication Application: Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting.

About the Authors

Actually I went straight off to this part after the Forward from Pritham Shetty to read about few of my favorite idols. Nothing much to read there, nothing funny, nothing out of the ordinary but that they are amazingly good developers, iconic digeratis that I admire.

Special thanks goes to Brian Lesser and Bruce Epstein of O’Reilly for the care they took so that I get my Review Copy in time.

Great book - very detailed!
Plain and simple,this book is a MUST HAVE. It is straightforward and highly detailed. The authors suggest that you look at FlashCom as pieces and components to get a better feel of how to use it effectively, and I agree. In fact, you should look at all OOP this way. It also shows you how to create your own FlashCom components and how to even add on to pre-existing flashCom components.

I love this book and if I could rate it higher than 5 stars I would. However, I still feel that Kevin Towes book is the ultimate foundation FlashCom book, only because of the real-world applications it showcases. It took me literally a few hours to completely digest this book simply because I’ve learned the groundwork from Mr. Towes book. Examples in this book can be great additions to the applications in Kevin’s book and they fully explain all the behind the scenes work that takes place in your FlashCom applications. Bottom line is that both make an excellent pair!

This book is totally a must have. People like myself don’t even want to hear you talk about FlashCom if you haven’t read this book. It’s that good. Great work guys!

Understand FCS
My company has been working with FCS for a while now, it really helps us communicate with customers and remote offices quite easily. So I picked up this book as soon as it came out, and it’s done a great job of filling in the holes of my FlashCom knowledge. This is the book that I wish I had over a year ago when I was learning FCS for the very first time. Seriously. Instead I had some Macromedia books that read like owners manuals. Those were painful days.

Anyhoo, there’s tons of example code in there. From wonderfully explicit "Hello World" type stuff, to keeping track of people in a virtual lobby. They really show you how to get at the power of FCS quite well.

Also, on a related note, one of the authors works on FCS for Macromedia, and his blog gives Flash Com info right from the horse’s mouth: http://peldi.com/blog/