This article addresses some consideration for your web hosting of ColdFusion and Flash applications. Many visitors to this site have a background in ColdFusion so ColdFusion hosting is covered briefly and a larger discussion of Flash hosting makes up the rest of this article.

ColdFusion Hosting - There are a number of things to be considered in determining needs for ColdFusion hosting. There are general web hosting concerns such as disk space, bandwidth, reliability, support, and cost. There are ColdFusion specific issues that include tag restrictions, security, database support, and ColdFusion version. For a detailed discussion of ColdFusion hosting, visit CFNewbie.com .

Flash Hosting - Flash movies or graphics are a client side vector images. Their appearance is dynamic but in most instaneous, they are static files. Flash files can be hosted on and served from virtually and web server. It is only when advanced features are called in from Flash's scripting language, ActionScript, that special server requirements are needed such as Flash Remoting and Flash Communications Server

Flash Remoting - Flash Remoting gives developers and designers the ability to easily bring dynamic content into their Flash movies. The integration of dynamic content and a dynamic presentation layer is know as Rich Internet Applications. For applications that are hosted on a server with ColdFusion MX or higher running, Flash Remoting is already available. For servers without ColdFusion MX, Flash Remoting can be added separately. To verify that your server has Flash Remoting installed and running, you can browse to the Flash Remoting gateway (example: http://www.flashcfm.com/flashservices/gateway ) to see a blank page if it is running or an error page if it is not.

Flash Communication Server - Flash Communications Server is a web server platform that adds interactivity to you Flash display elements. Features you can add include video on demand, live event broadcasts, webcam chat, and real-time collaboration applications.

The Past: Macromedia Generator - Prior to the release of the MX generation of products, Macromedia had a server tool named Generator that allowed developers to dynamically change Flash movies on the fly. The Flash development environment had a Generator add in that allowed for the creation of Flash templates. When a template was called, Generator would populate the template with data and images based on calls to datasources. Generator would then serve a Flash movie to the browser. The introducion of Flash MX and Flash Remoting replaced nearly all of the functionality that Generator provided.

The Future: Macromedia Flex - At Max 2003, Macromedia introduced Flex. Flex is a presentation server that runs on top of a J2EE that has a rich set of interface components, utilizes its own XML language and utilizes object orient programming. Essentially, Flex provides a Rich Internet Application display layer for J2EE and .Net developers.

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