February 2003 - Posts
One project I've been working on
recently involves the following:
- .NET application that listens to a legacy hospital
system spitting out lab results
- SQLXML templates that enable extracting and
updating a database of patients and results using a common XML
format
- .NET Windows Application that hosts a Flash
ActiveX object
- Flash movie that displays Patients, Lab Results
and Test Results
The Flash app was the main area I worked on, to
achieve my results I had to create my own classes, and extend some internal
classes. I create an Event Broadcaster, a base Collection, a Debug/Trace object,
and did some custom extensions to the internal XML/XMLNode objects to add
minimal XPath support.
The end result with the initial prototype is that new
Patients are added to an onscreen list (allowing for animation which will be
added shortly), updates to Patients are handled (next iteration will add
highlighting as a visual cue that an update has occurred), new Lab Results are
added to the correct Patient, animating in (moving all existing results to the
right) to provide a visual cue of the change.
It currently supports some simple scrolling, we'll be
adding some smoother scrolling soon.
So, what's the end result of this? Doctors and Nurses
in a Cardiac ward (and later other wards) will be able to see instant updates of
Lab Results for Patients in an intuitive interface that is accessed using a
touch-screen.
The users will not need any technical skill with
computers, there's even a possibility of adding proximity detection (with the
use of special cards Doctors can wear around their necks) that will allow a
doctor to filter the list to just his/her Patients with a single
click.
I think this application shows a good use of XML, Web
Services, .NET (C#) and Flash MX to create an easy and intuitive solution to a
real-world problem.
What do you think?
Using the Flash Player's built in MP3
support, it would be easy to create a Juke-box application.
If you make sure your users have version 6.0r40 player or
greater, you can even display extra information such as songname, artist, album
etc.
You
can get full details in the release notes for Flash Player 6
.
A cool idea would be to use .NET to create a database of
MP3's providing a search facility etc exposed as a XML Web Service which
could be consumed by Flash.
Macromedia Flash Remoting MX
is a product that allows you to call VB.NET or C#.NET methods directly
from within Flash MX.
These methods can return native ActionScript objects which
you can then use in Flash MX. As an added advantage the data is sent as binary
data instead of verbose XML... I'm a big fan of sending things as XML myself but
it does take a bit of work to parse/validate/handle it if you simple want an
object with a few properties, or a simple Array.
Macromedia have a nice online book
that talks
about how to use it, I haven't had a chance to read through it fully myself but
it looks good from what I've seen so far.
There's a Development Centre on
the Macromedia site that has lots of stuff to look at and play with too, not to
be missed if you want to know more!
Lastly I would like to recommend a book which has been given great
reviews,
Flash.NET.
Just testing to see if
I can post from the editor app. Feel free to ignore this post
;)
Well, I've joined the masses and
got one of these Blog things... yet another way for me to waste hours of my time
:)
I'll try to keep this updated
with all sorts of Flash MX and .NET goodies.
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