Building the Future of Communications Applications

This article initially appeared in the January edition of the Edge Newsletter.

At Macromedia, it's always exciting when we get to leverage our strengths and assets to create new opportunities for our developers. I've been involved in building Macromedia technologies for over 10 years, and it's great to see how the products have evolved and come together to create new possibilities.

Part of the upcoming Breeze 4.0 release, Breeze Live brings together the following three technologies to enable our innovative community of developers to create custom communication applications and content for their customers:

• Macromedia Flash — the leading tool for creating rich interactive experiences.
• Macromedia Breeze — the integrated solution for rapid online training and communication.
• Macromedia Flash Communication Server — the server platform for creating custom communication and rich media applications.

Enter the pod

Breeze Live is built on the concept of pods. Pods are modular units that can be combined and arranged to create custom experiences. A standard pod layout in Breeze Live contains a chat pod, a content pod with PowerPoint slides, a participant list pod, and a camera and video pod. This arrangement supports remote display and collaboration.

For example, if you want to host a collaborative software demonstration, you would use the standard screen-sharing pod, instead of the PowerPoint pod. This flexible user interface is the core strength of Breeze Live. Today, anybody can go far beyond restrictive hosted services to create inclusive, inviting online meetings with their own look, feel, and functionality.

Customizing the pod

Breeze Live gives developers the ability to create custom pods — a new kind of communication tool that solves specific problems. Here are two examples of how custom pods can solve real-world problems.

The virtual classroom: Imagine that you need to build a virtual classroom to teach your nationwide service team how to install a new mechanical device. Macromedia Breeze has all the standard features you need to store the learning assets, track progress, and do live remote training. Using the customization functionality of Breeze Live, you can also build a live simulation of the system to help the technicians learn the process more quickly and with fewer errors. After building the simulation — a Flash movie that shows how the parts move and interact — you can set playback parameters so that all the students see the behavior in real time, for full control of the learning experience.

The key to this kind of application is a custom Breeze Live pod. A developer can write code in the pod that's aware of all the participants in the room and can display custom information to each participant in real time. It's easy to either set all the screens to synchronize, or to have them show individual information to each participant. The developer can lock the controls so that only the instructor can make changes, or they can set the controls to allow any user to manipulate the model. Building a complete virtual classroom and collaboration application as a stand-alone unit would take a huge amount of development time, but a skilled Flash developer can build a pod in just a few weeks. The pod can take advantage of all the other pod-based Breeze Live capabilities and provide a cohesive rich media experience that can be reused across multiple Breeze Live meeting rooms.

The sales pod: Perhaps your telesales team needs to handle orders from your business customers. Any customer that has access to the Internet can instantly join a sales person in a Breeze Live room, connected by a simple URL provided to them over the phone. In that room, the sales person can display an order form pod. The customer can enter their order information directly into the form, saving everyone time. The salesperson can then select the appropriate options and discounts from their private interface. The form would instantly access the business logic through the existing back-end application infrastructure to price the product choices. Both the sales person and customer would see just the information and options they need. Once the order is placed, it can be instantly submitted to the back-end application for processing.

Custom pods in Breeze Live provide the infrastructure to make this kind of application easy and affordable to build for any enterprise.

Building opportunities

There will also be opportunities for developers who want to sell their pods directly to Breeze Live customers. If you develop a specialized pod that supports specific functionality you know Breeze Live customers will need, you can package your pod so that any Breeze Live customer can upload it directly to their enterprise service or hosted Breeze account and use it immediately.

The works

From a technical perspective, a custom pod in Breeze Live has two basic components. The client-side Flash movie is a standard Flash movie that can access some simple Breeze Live APIs that provide access to the participant list and other information. There can also be a server-side script that runs on the Flash Communication Server that supports Breeze Live. This script has access to APIs that communicate with the participant pods, and access Breeze Live data and communication with standard web services through Flash Remoting.

Now that you know all about pods, discover how you can use them to simplify development, and to accelerate online meetings, presentations, and training with Breeze. Visit the Breeze home page to view a demo, download a free trial, or to get in touch with a Breeze specialist.

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