In addition to the communication models that streams and shared objects provide, Flash Media Interactive Server and Flash Media Development Server can interact with external data sources, such as web services and relational databases, or with other Flash Media Server applications. For example, Server-Side ActionScript can be written to connect to a web service (use the WebService class) or to a ColdFusion application to retrieve a list of names and phone numbers. The results of the query can then be placed in a shared object.

For more information, see the Developer Guide and the Server-Side ActionScript Language Reference.