O’Reilly: Inside RIA

If you have had an opportunity to look at the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) you could see that there is a huge opportunity to do interesting multi-user applications without needing to write all of the server side code. However there is the challenge of how do you control who comes into your application and what they are allowed to do. In addition, keeping your application credentials safe in case your SWF file was decompiled. So as the title suggests you can use a service like Facebook to take care of the users authentication and Flash Remoting for the application authentication.

More and more the idea of having a social experience has become part of what makes the internet a unique experience compared to other mediums. Over time sites have added the ability to share, comment and evaluate information. To deliver things like chat, file sharing or a multi-user game can require a fair amount of work on both the client side and the server side. The Adobe Flash Collaboration Service gives developers a way to create their own multi-user experience, without the need to manage and maintain servers and work with tools that Flex developer are all ready used to using.

AFCS (Adobe Flash Collaboration Service) previously known as 'Cocomo' is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that that allows Flex developers to address a class of applications known as collaborative applications.

Collaborative Applications have progressed from a nice cool thing into serious applications. Almost all of us would have participated in an online chat or a web meeting, which allows a group of users to chat, share files, do screen sharing, take polls, ask questions and receive answers, etc. AFCS aims to lower the barrier to entry for developers to bring such collaborative features into their applications.

In this post, we will focus on getting started with Adobe Flash Collaboration Services (formerly Cocomo). If you've heard of this, but aren't really sure what it is, AFCS is a hosted service provided by Adobe which enables real-time collaboration within your own Flex applications.