If you've been annoyed by Flash Remoting articles that presume you already understand Flash, there's a great article that quickly walks you through the basics without expecting any prior experience with the Flash interface. A hearty congrats to good ole' Ben Forta for his November CFDJ article, Data Entry ReFORMed. In my mind these are the best 2300 words I can recommend to someone looking to get started with integrate Flash and CF, especially if you already appreciate the power but have looked at various samples and said, "yeah sure, but I can't do that".
Now, don't get me wrong. The various remoting articles at the DesDev, as well as other recent articles in the CFDJ and those at sites like flashcfm.com and mxdev.com are all also fine for showing how to do remoting, but they all presume some Flash experience. As soon as an article says something like "place this actionscript in the actions panel for the first frame", they've lost anyone who doesn't yet know what that means. And while some offer a pre-built flash file to get the reader started, that's no good if the reader isn't shown how to get the file to that point. Ben's article walks you through the bare minimum needed to get started.
And the really cool news is that if you read Ben's article, you'll have enough to be motivated and capable of then enjoying all those fine resources.
Flash/server integration is something I've really come around to after my own painful exploration in the past several months of dozens of books and many more articles. I plan to start sharing more and more. In fact, I've already got a new user group presentation, "Flash for CFers: Getting Over the Hump", available for presentation to any groups that would like me to present it. You can see the PDF of the slides at my site. I'm also exploring being able to present it remotely, whether live or recorded. Let me know if you're interested.
I'm also working on a day-long seminar of the same title to be available soon, and possibly a 3 day class, and also a book. Look for my site and this blog to offer many resources and lessons learned.
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