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Raphael Lee

Raphael Lee

Adobe

Hironmay Basu

Hironmay Basu

Adobe

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Some background information, and about the overall design
  3. Breakout Group model
  4. Breakout Group view
  5. Breakout Group controller
  6. Brief review of the Collaboration Builder SDK messaging model
  7. Miscellaneous topics
  8. Advanced topic: A race condition
  9. Advanced topic: An in-between sort of message
Created:
13 November 2006
User Level:
Beginner
Products:
Acrobatconnect

Building a project with Adobe Acrobat Connect Collaboration Builder SDK

A few months ago, the Acrobat Connect team was asked to write a project by one of its major clients. At the time, we had just been hired, and we were learning how to make draggable red squares and interactive quizzes: the Hello Worlds of ActionScript development. Somehow, through an unknown and complicated decision-making process that may or may not have involved a Magic Eight-Ball, our managers saw fit to assign the project to us. It'll be a good learning experience, they told us. Also, if you mess up, our relationship with this client will go up in smoke. No pressure!

And so, over the course of the following two months, this project saw us through the early days of our Flash developer lives. Supervised by senior developer Nigel Pegg, we experienced the joys and despairs of the common Collaboration Builder developer. By the time we handed it off to our client, we had learned some nice tricks to help us get things done.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the Collaboration Builder SDK (formerly Breeze Sync SWF SDK) can be used in a medium-size, multiuser Breeze pod application. Along the way, we'll touch on some other subjects we thought were likely to be encountered by fellow Collaboration Builder SDK developers:

  • Overall design: why the MVC architectural pattern will save us all
  • How to maintain a consistent state between application instances
  • Significance of the caughtUp() event
  • Handling race conditions: How to cope when two people do something at the same time that only one person should be doing at once
  • Stateful messages, delta messages, and everything in between
  • Resizing the pod window, and how to keep things from poking out of it

We hope this record of our development process will illuminate some of the issues surrounding Breeze pod development and help you dodge some of the problems we faced. We're releasing the application's code publicly so that you can see how we chose to do things.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Adobe Acrobat Connect Collaboration Builder SDK

Any ActionScript editor to read our code


Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional

Sample files:

Prerequisite knowledge

Experience writing a basic, non-collaborative Acrobat Connect pod.

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About the authors

Raphael Lee is a software developer for Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional. A recent graduate of Brown University, he lives in the Haight district of San Francisco. His purpose is to flip out and write code.

Hironmay Basu is a software developer for Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional. His experience includes developing multiuser applications using the Collaboration Builder SDK. He worked earlier on the Photoshop CS2 team working with ImageReady. He has an MS degree from UC Irvine and a BTech from IIT Kharagpur, India. He has active interests in the fields of algorithms and graphics.