The beauty of Flashcom's server side AS

I love it. I use it as much as I can whenever and wherever I can. Why? Well that's something I'd like to help others understand, so I'll write a couple of paragraphs on it (another topic I've wanted to write up on for a while now..)

The biggest "immediate" bonus I have found using SSAS (server side actionscript) is that nobody can see it but me. In other words, even if you steal my code with ASV or some other decompiling program, you'll most likely not get it to work properly, mainly because I hide most of the meat in the server side and just make calls to it. There are a lot of discussions going on right now on this topic and I really wanted to point out that if you plan and design your apps right in the beginning, your FCS apps can stay reasonably safe. That's a major bonus, but it's only if you are worried about your app getting ripped off by some swf thief out there. If that's not a big deal then this bonus isn't so great.

What's the best bonus though? I have found that putting most of my "controlling" functions server side, I have central command of what is going on in my app. This is extremely important as I actually mentioned in a past post here when talking about debugging FCS apps.

If you ever have an application where a user's properties, for example their status (busy, away, here, sleeping...) needs changing, you should never ever "set" the value on the client side. Send that value to the server where the server will take it and set the value. This isn't so much a big deal where only one user can set one value as it is when you have a lot of users who have the chance to set one value (or more). If you don't control this server side, you are going to see mayhem in your app, and nothing will work as you wanted it to (depending on the app of course, but in my experience... ) This is the absolute beauty of SSAS. I recommend sitting down and learning it, using it, making mistakes, fixing them, all kinds of things. Play with it, learn tricks that will be useful in future apps. There are a lot of functions you can create that can be used throughout many many apps you build now and in the future. ID creating, password changing, status changing, kicking users off your app... stuff like that.

Safe, easy (reasonably), effective, reusable.. what more could you want?

Posted by Graeme at January 22, 2004 11:27 AM