Falcon – Adobe Flash 9 AS3 Data Class

Have you ever wondered how social network sites are built like facebook, YouTube, flickr, MySpace, etc. and sites like Ebay, Amazon, any forums, wikis, blogs, etc.? There is a front end that you see and a back end that sits on a server. To be able to share data and make elegant use of the Internet as a medium, we have to be able to pass data (in variable or XML or JSON, etc. format) from the front end to the back end and back again.

Falcon is an Adobe Flash custom class that lets you send and receive variables, text, XML or binary data. You can load XML or text from a file or send and receive variables or XML to and from a server script like PHP and then on to a database like MySQL. Falcon automatically makes a DataProvider if your variables are sequential so that it is easy to make a DataGrid (table in Flash).

The Flash scripting language, ActionScript 3.0 is now a complete Object Oriented Programming language that follows the ECMAScript standard as does JavaScript. In doing so, the language has become very internally consistent. For this consistency to work, the former classes (properties and functions) have been broken down into smaller or more precise classes. This means that to handle data, ActionScript 3 now has five classes that are used to load even just one variable! These are URLVariables, URLRequest, URLRequestMethod, URLLoader and URLLoaderDataFormat. This results in fifteen lines of code.

Falcon wraps or combines these native AS3 classes into one class. The class uses three active lines of code. This simplification makes it easier for designers and developers to provide important functionality of sharing information.

As an inventor of social games, tools and environments, I realize the importance of passing data to the server so that it can be shared. This technique is used in the following Darth Detector, Changing Mail, Chatnap, Baron Digbody’s Castle, Lady With Brooch, Danisms, Dens, Dan Zen Garden, Gorgolon, Grim Reaper’s Age Guesser, Gycopo, Hip Cats, Kula Pu Idol, Moustache Mysteries, Opartica, Pagoda Of Games, Password Paradox, Tapoll, Prediction Train, Rich Deck, Salamander, Save Earth, Spirogram, Spy-mail, Telepathy, Teleporters, Tilator, Tower Of Babel, Web Ouija, Utopia, Wannaget, Word Warp, Yesumno, Zen Deck, Zen Dots, Zen Mix, Zen Motto, Zen Pass, and Zen Picture Pan Zoom.

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Tags: actionscript, as3, class, cs3, data, falcon, flash, URLLoader, URLLoaderDataFormat, URLRequest, URLRequestMethod, urlvariables