Building Flash clients for Web Services with Soap and Flash MX

Building Flash clients for Web Services with Soap and Flash MX

Topics Covered

• Interacting between Flash and Web Services
• Using the new Load Vars Object in Flash MX
• Using Components to simplify the process
• Using Styles to easily change the look of your components and text fields
• Why use Soap based Web Services

Overview

In this tutorial we are going to build a Flash Language Translator. The language translator will be able to translate between any two languages. The Language translation service was chosen because it's basic, yet provides an easy way to get into web services and is something you can use on your site right away. The tutorial also shows the basic's of using components in a Flash movie and loading dynamic content into them.

First lets take a look at what a soap based web service is. It's easy to get lost in all the technical definitions of web services - so we take a very basic approach. A web service is any server side logic that can be accessed over standard network protocols (HTML, XML, SMTP, etc). So that being the case - web services in general are nothing new. What's new is the SOAP standard. What soap does is standardize the way messages are sent between a Client and a Service. Usually soap messages are sent to a server, which then invoke some application and returns the result. Well their are quite a few more use's but for this tutorial we'll leave it at that. A simple way for any programming language from any server, device, other application, etc - to communicate with any other server, device, application in any programming language.

We really don't need to spend any time on the details of what a web service is or does for this tutorial, as all we want to do is be able to use them to add additional functionality to a flash movie. We'll go into them a bit more as this progresses. First we have to take care of the Flash side of things. If you want to get an idea of what where building - you can do so here:

In the service directory or Or by itself. The actual service is provided by xMethods here.

So lets move on...