Creating a video e-card application for mobile devices

Getting started

This article covers the steps necessary to build a simple video e-card system for mobile phones with Flash Lite 3 installed. Like other web-to-mobile systems, this video e-card system uses a server-side script and database. For the purposes of this article, I'll use ASP files and a Microsoft Access database.

Before diving into the technical details of building the application, let me provide an overview of the here components that make up a typical mobile e-card system for Flash Lite devices:

• Back end: The back end is responsible for creating and updating user profiles, as well as tracking the e-card's profiles. It is comprised of server-side scripts and a database. The back end is the core of the entire system—every transaction that occurs in the application takes place on the back end, and then the necessary data is sent to the e-card client.
• Client: The e-card client is the part of the application that is installed on the user's handset. This is the part that displays the user interface of the application and enables users to view or send cards, as well as other actions (depending on the functionality you add to the application).
• E-cards: The e-cards contain the greeting messages. In this project, e-cards consist of FLV files. These files are stored on the server and are downloaded to the user's handset as needed.

In this article, I'll focus on building two parts of the e-card system:

• Creating sample video e-cards. For this task, I'll use some simple FLV files to create the e-cards. The e-cards will be downloaded to the server at runtime to be played inside an e-card client.
• Building the e-card client, including setting up the communication between the server-side scripts and the e-card client.

Note: The step-by-step instructions for creating the ASP files and configuring the Microsoft Access database for the client-server communication are outside the scope of this article. However, I will discuss the input for each specific ASP file used in this project, and also describe the data returned from the server-side scripts to the FLA file, so that you can get a better understanding of how the whole system works.

If you haven't done so already, download the sample files that accompany this article. The sample files contain the ASP server-side scripts that you will use as the back end for this project. In the following section, you'll use FLV files to build some mobile e-card video greetings.

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