Ultrashock Tutorials

Ultrashock Tutorials > Flash5 > Multi-user Flash5

by: David Colquhoun, davidcolquhoun.com

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Multi-user Flash5 - Introduction

Introduction

One of my favourite buzz words at the moment is "community". The rationale for "community" is that if people feel as if they are part of your website, they'll keep coming back, and bring their friends with them. Resulting in more hits for your banner ads. To create "community" you need to have communication - easy engaging communication. Systems like ICQ or IRC are great for texting to your friends, but you can't easily brand them with your product. This is where Flash comes in. Flash allows you to create your own custom communication device, whether it's text base, avatars in a virtual bar, or people trying to shoot each other (yes I mean multi-player games!).

This series of tutorials will explain a variety of networking and communication strategies, and give you example source code that you can use to build your own custom chat room. This tutorial assumes you have a basic knowledge of Flash 5 Actionscript and access to a server running either ASP or PHP. I'll try to keep the ASP and PHP code as generic as possible, so hopefully you can move it to your server and away you go. Where this isn't possible, I'll explain the code and provide links to some great PHP and ASP web sites that will take you through the basics.

Part 1. Beginners level
Why sockets are difficult, why HTTP is easy, and an explanation of each.

Part 2. Beginners level
How to write a very simple HTTP based echo server.

Part 3. Intermediate level
How to write a HTTP based multi-user chat application.

Introduction | part 1 | part 2 | part 3