24.1 Developing the Application Overview

The video chat/message center application, perhaps more than any of the others in this book, requires good planning. This is because this application requires three parts that must work in tight coordination:

The administrator client

The administrator is the person who receives incoming calls and can listen to messages that callers have left. You need to create a client that can accept incoming calls and retrieve messages from the FlashCom server.

The caller 4client

Many callers can attempt to call the one administrator. The caller client should enable a caller to place a call to the administrator. If the administrator is not logged in, is on another call, or simply doesn't accept the incoming call, the caller should be able to leave a video message.

The server-side application file

The server-side part of the FlashCom application has a lot of work to do as well. It is responsible for keeping track of who is connected, who is calling, who is leaving messages, etc. This portion of the application is the main switchboard that keeps everything in order. In this application, we keep all the server-side code in a single ASC file.