An Online Presentation Application With Flash Communication Server MX part 1

Introduction:

I believe most of you guys have attended online presentations with Macromedia Breeze or at least you have heard of Macromedia Breeze earlier and you may have thought, “What an outstanding application! I want to deliver my presentations, but I can’t afford it, what should I do? Can I make an application like this?” The answer is yes! After reading this article you can make something like macromedia breeze. In this first part of this series, we will learn how to create such an application that lets you deliver your presentations online to your customers/visitors/clients and employees with features like slide-by-slide presentation, voice-over by the presenter, and chat facility b/w presenter and attendees of this presentation. So let’s move forward.

Overview

Application’s Workflow:

The application will work according to these steps.

At first, you will create slides for the presentation that you want to deliver in this presentation.

At first, you will create slides for the presentation that you want to deliver in this presentation.
Place the Slides folder on your web server.
Create the list of topics in an XML file name topics.xml
Setup flash communication server and create the application directory.
Create a Flash Movie. The movie will ask your name, when you will login, then this movie will connect you to flash comm. Server application meanwhile, it will also load that list of topics from xml file, once the xml file has been loaded, flash will load the first slide in a movie clip.
If you are logged in as an admin, then this flash movie will initialize your microphone and will transmit your voice to all the users connected to this application. Being an admin, you can change the current slide by clicking on the appropriate topic in the topics list and this change will also be made on all connected clients.
If you are not logged in as an admin, then this movie will assume that you are a guest attendee, so it will grab voice of presenter and starts playing it, so that you can not only see slides but can also listen to what he is saying. Being a guest, you can’t change slides your self.
You can chat with admin/guests to ask questions etc.

Requirements for this article:

To complete this article you will need:

Macromedia Flash MX 2004 (if you don’t have Flash, you can download a trial version from this link).
Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX 1.5 Try or Buy from this link.
Presentation material (slides).
Basic knowledge of using ActionScript and creating applications using Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX.
Source files included with this article
Some basic knowledge of HTML and XML

Directory Structure on your web server.
Creating Presentation Slides.
Placing JPG slides in the slides folder.
Creating list of topics in an external XML file.
Setting up Flash Communication Server MX directory.
Creating an interface of your application and writing client side ActionScript to connect the Flash movie to Flash Communication Server and to loading list of topics of presentation from XML file.
Writing Server side ActionScript.
Writing HTML to finalize the application.
Conclusion.

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