Data integration overview

Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 provides a flexible component-based architecture and object model for connecting to external data sources, managing data, and binding data to user interface components. There are three main areas of data integration:

• Data connectivity: Connector layer of the architecture with components providing the ability to send and receive data from a variety of external data sources, such as web services and XML. See Data connectivity (Flash Professional only).
• Data management: Data repository layer of the architecture with components providing intelligent supervision of common data operations, such as editing, sorting, filtering, aggregation, and translation of changes. See Data management (Flash Professional only).
• Data binding: Data pipeline layer of the architecture providing a mechanism to share data between component properties. The pipeline integrates objects such as formatters and encoders to provide complete control over how the data is propagated between components. See Data binding (Flash Professional only).

The following image depicts the flow of data within a Flash application and identifies the different elements that make up the Flash data architecture. Data binding is represented by the red arrows between the components.

Note: It is important to understand that Flash is a client-side technology. Flash data integration provides all the necessary tools and features to access your data, manipulate it, and send it back to a server in many different formats. Building and exposing business logic on the server is the job of a server developer and is best implemented using products that are specifically designed for that task (such as Cold Fusion, J2EE Application Servers, and ASP.NET).

For a tutorial that introduces Flash data architecture, see www.macromedia.com/go/data_integration.