Some history: I developed a Plone CMS/XML/Flash app a year ago for a university and have had problems with speed, XML filesize and scalability (for rather obvious reasons). Now I have a contract for a MAJOR music/film entertainer and want similar functionality with increased speed and use of AMF. I started yesterday with custom php/mySQL and Flash Remoting and then found this group. :-)
I have been told the entertainer typically receives 150,000 unique visitors a month although there is a performance at the winter Olympics in China (March, site premiere) and there will be a huge surge in traffic, also a new CD and a tour in 2008. Typically there are between 100-200 active site visitors from what I can see on the current site.
My initial query is about performance. I have searched previous posts to this group, googled and reviewed all the example sites. I don't see any sites that might have this many simultaneous visitors.
Does anyone have any advice, warnings, experience with a Drupal/AMFPHP/Flex solution for a major A-list celebrity, or other high traffic sites?
Hopefully this is an appropriate choice and I can work with this great group for ideas.
Sincerely yours,
Wishbone
Comments
Two things I learned:
Two things I learned:
I can't give you performance stats yet.
Flex and CDN's
Thanks for the tips toemaz.
I will check out the Flash options - I have found the docs at modern-carpentry.com about using Flash AS3 instead of Flex. I'll dig a little deeper.
As for the CDN tip - I have a dedicated server at Rackspace already for this site - it will allow me install Drupal and any modules or dependencies. I planned on running the Drupal and the Flex on this same box - can you explain how this will be a problem?
Thanks.
Re: New Drupal/AMFPHP/Flex site
Hi wishbone,
The http://www.flex.org/showcase is built using Flex and Drupal. My user group (in conjunction with the DUG in Seattle) did a presentation on this integration last year. I have the slides for the presentation if you want them, PM me with your info.
Also I would give you a word of caution if you plan to have your whole site be Flex. With a high-profile site, if it's all Flex you will have issues with getting it FULLY indexed by Google and the like.
Best Regards,
Ali D.,
User Group Manager,
Seattle Adobe Flex User Group
http://www.seaflexug.org
http://www.flexcodejam.org
spiders in the logs
Indeed (PM sent), but will the spiders crawl the Drupal content? Maybe I'll need to submit a "Drupal'd" link instead of the Flash/Flex front end?
Interesting point....
Thanks for the slides.
If the data being displayed
If the data being displayed in the Flex app is not readily availble to the public ( and spiders ) then the answer is no. I would suggest using the XML Sitemap module to provide Google a sitemap to crawl. Either way content requests from within the Flex app will not prove valuable to your rankings
vision media
350designs
Tj Holowaychuk
Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design
Victoria British Columbia Web Design School
+1 Subscribed
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/
SWFAddress
As tourguide mentions below, look into using SWFAddress with your Flash/Flex app. This will allow your flash site to accept 'urls' (really just specially formatted anchors in the address) which enables bookmarking. To get better SEO, look into the SEO methods for SWFAddress (http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/seo/). What happens with the SEO method is you have an .htaccess which allows spiders (like Google) to crawl to real html links (/about/me) but if a person using a web browser visits, she is directed instead to the SWFurl (#/about/me). Google will then pick up all the content and links (to /about/me) but when a user clicks that link from google she will be auto-redirected to the SWFurl and the flash site will load and take them to that specific content.
B.McMurray
B.McMurray
New Drupal/AMFPHP/Flex site
Hi Devguy,
I want to develop a site in drupal and flex. i very new to flex. can u please send me the presentations.
My gmail id: sagar.sijju@gmail.com
Thanks in advance.
Drupal/Flash with no AMFPHP
I have created 5 sites and am working on a 6th that use Drupal and Flash. I opted not to use AMFPHP because we are not using Flash to do data entry so there really is no need as far as I can tell. Take a look:
These are English only:
http://www.serta.com
http://www.pennzoil.com
http://www.quakerstate.com
These have internationalization:
http://www.pennzoil.ca
http://www.quakerstate.ca
Feel free to ping me if you like.
Cheers,
Jason
No AMFPHP?
Hi Jason,
So, if you're not using AMFPHP, are you just parsing the XHTML? If so, this seems like a good plan, especially if you're using a lot of modules/blocks which seems to be the biggest limitation of the Drupal Services. Do you have any guidance/examples of how you're parsing the data, and how you set up your them templates/swfs?
Thanks, and great work on the sites you listed!!
Glenn.
Hi Glenn, You are correct,
Hi Glenn,
You are correct, the sites are created to parse the xHTML. I just finished a project where I created XML as well as xHTML. The Flash gets the XML and non-flash users get the xHTML. It was a bit of work but well worth the trouble.
Because the sites uses AS3 we are able to take advantage of e4x. This allows us to target specific elements in the data source with a great amount of control. We can then build objects and use them as we see fit.
I will try to get together some samples that I will share.
Cheers,
Jason
Drupal 7 idea
Hi Jason,
Very cool! I've actually been hoping to find someone with experience doing this (building a Flash app that parses page content, not just raw data). Here's why: I worked on a patch for Drupal 7 with the intention of making this kind of work easier: http://drupal.org/node/599804, and I'd like some feedback on whether this in fact achieves what I hoped it would. The idea is you can have a module implement hook_page_delivery_callback_alter(), within that hook detect that you want to send back the page in a format friendly to Flash, and set the delivery callback to a function that can do that (for example: "mymodule_deliver_flash"). Then your mymodule_deliver_flash() function receives the result of a page callback, which in Drupal 7 should almost always be a render array, and can render that array differently than the way drupal_deliver_html_page() does it for HTML delivery. Within Drupal 7 core, the only delivery callback other than drupal_deliver_html_page() is ajax_deliver(), but I'm really hoping to see some contrib examples of delivery callbacks for Flash and other clients.
Anyway, I'd love to see an example of this concept working for some RIA (in theory the entire Drupal interface, including administrative tasks, could work in a Flash app with relatively little code). I hope this interests you or someone in this group. If someone does something cool with this, please post it. If discussion is needed, please feel free to open a new post in this group. I'm adding this as a reply here, because it seems to fit with what you just pulled off (I'm assuming for Drupal 6).
Thanks,
Alex.
Interesting.
Very interesting, thank you for you work and suggstions
Any samples to share
Hi Jason,
It's been a while since I've checked this thread, but your approach is still tops on our list. Any chance you'll be able to post those samples? :-)
Glenn.