Topic: "New Tools for Educational Technology: Object-Oriented
Components and Streaming Video in Flash MX 2004 Pro"

Facilitator: Dr. Mike Guidry
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Center for Advanced Educational Technology

Mike will provide an overview of "the rather remarkable advances"
associated with the newest version of Macromedia Flash: MX2004
Professional. These include:

1. New streaming media capabilities that allow video (with audio) to
be streamed to the SWF file while it is playing and controlled
(independent of the main Flash timeline) just like any other Flash
resource. This has almost unlimited potential application and finally
puts video on an equal footing with everything else that Flash can do.

2. New data-binding classes that allow one to connect data fields of
components so that if a value changes in one it is automatically
updated in the other. These can be implemented with almost no
actionscript, and can bind components within an application as well as
bind components in a Flash application to variables across a network
in a database. We have done these kinds of things before using
relatively advanced actionscript. They can now be done better and
with very little actionscript (mostly just clicking selections in the
Flash interface).

3. The old Flash 5 Smartclips, which matured as Components in Flash
MX, have really matured in MX 2004 Pro. There are now 30 very well
developed and documented Components that ship with Pro (and many
others available from 3rd parties). They do everything from screen
widgetry to data binding to streaming video, and they do it really
well. A Flash novice can now implement with a few clicks things that
required days of advanced Actionscript programming under Flash MX.

To demonstrate the power of MX2004 Pro, he wrote a single Flash
program that uses all 30 Components (!) in a non-trivial way at least
once, with heavy commenting in the Actionscript so that the Flash file
provides a documented example of how to use each Component. You can
view the SWF of this file to get an overview of what the MX2004 Pro
components are capable of, and get the .fla source file with example
code for programming all these components, at

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/guidry/MX2004Demo/