An Online Presentation Application With Flash Communication Server MX – part 2

Introduction:

This is 2^nd part of this series of articles targeting the steps required to create an online presentation application with Adobe’s (formerly Macromedia Inc.) Flash Communication server 1.5. In the last episode, we learnt how to make a simple presentation application that enabled the presenter to show Jpeg slides to, deliver speech/information about the slides and the users could interact through a text chat.

The general rule in such applications is the greater the number of users, the greater the load on the server and if the application are flooded by un-invited users, then the application may suffer performance issues. In order to avoid this problem, we will learn how to avoid non-invited users by giving access to a select group of users.

Overview

Requirements for this article:

The requirement of this article are the same as in part 1. To complete this part you will need:

Macromedia Flash MX 2004/Flash 8 (if you don’t have Flash, you can download a trial version from this link).
Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX 1.5 or Adobe’s Flash Media Server 2. Try or Buy from Adobe’s (previously Macromedia) download page.
A presentation slide that you created in the previous part.
Basic knowledge of using Actionscript and creating applications using Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX.
The completed files of last episode as we will proceed from the point where we left last time.

NOTE: I will proceed from the point where we left in last part. So you will be needed all the finished files of last part. Make sure by running them once again that they are working properly. Make sure that main.asc file is in the Pres folder under the applications folder of Flash Communication Server’s installation directory. Make a backup of your previous files so in case of any mistake; you can go back to previous version.

Application’s Workflow:

In this article, the workflow of the application will be a little bit different from the last article because we have already setup everything such as presentation slides, the flash communication server application directory, the html page etc. The application will proceed by following these steps:

Get the information of the user from an external XML file that we will create shortly.
Login the users automatically (So no need of logging in the user as we did in the previous article).
Enjoy the presentation.

In addition to this, we will also create an admin interface that will help us to invite a select group of users while creating the user’s XML file.

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