Generator / Flash web development

TITLE: Generator / Flash web development - Workflow process from planning to production PUBLISHER: New Riders ISBN: 0-7357-1080-5 PAGES: 224 b/w CD: Yes AUTHORS: Richard Alvarez, Jason Taylor, Matthew Groch Get it now from Amazon.com

Clients build websites to make money.

They make money from the punters who visit their site. Keeping those punters coming back is what the lovely marketing people like to call 'stickiness'. What we like to call the lovely marketing people can't be repeated here.

The key to keeping people coming back to a site is fresh content.

The key to making fresh content manageable is the dynamic website.

And the key to a dynamic website is… you guessed it, Generator. Well, not quite. As you may or may not know, Generator is Macromedia's solution for creating and maintaining dynamic websites. It is the middleware that creates custom web pages and graphics, including SWF files.

It comes in two flavours:

'Offline Generator' is a snip at about $1K and can be used to batch process multiple SWF files using a system of templates and databases.

'Enterprise Generator' lets you do much the same thing only live on the web server. That one kicks in at a $3K (per processor).

This book scores a number of firsts. It is the first Flash book to really concentrate on the 'process' of building a dynamic Flash site. It is also the first book to evangelise the use of Generator in offline mode as the primary tool to optimise this process.

There are authorative chapters on site planning, dynamic design, database development, Generator template construction, building data entry tools and on final production.

As with any book about process, a lot of the advice seems like common sense but even if you know the best practice, it is often handy to be reminded of it.

The key concept the book promotes is 'workflow optimisation'; an idea already familiar to followers of Macromedia strategy. Initiatives such as Project Whirlwind within the organisation have been targetting workflow optimisation as a top priority. In fact this concept is likely to be the driving force behind the feature set in Flash 6.

What this book does is explain how offline Generator can be made to work within the site design process and to illustrate how its inclusion will speed up many of the more labourious tasks. It shows how Generator can help bridge the gap between static and dynamic site.

The book is quite sympathetic to the technophobe designer, breaking you in gently to the black art of databases. It delivers simple explanations of SQL and ASP. In fact, Microsoft solutions (ASP and Access in particlular) are covered in more depth than their Linux alternatives. In one odd section XML is bizarrely subtitled 'The future' even though it is clearly Flash 5 native.

The tutorials are necessarily over simple. Although sufficiently technical the Access 101 and SQL 101 tutorials go a long way to demystifying the designer to the black art of databases.

It is worth noting that a lot of the process and concepts here can also be applied to HTML site development. All in all an expert guidebook to your first steps in a bigger world.

 

 

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