How Does Firefly Work?
Firefly was designed to provide developers with a flexible component-based architecture for retrieving, manipulating, and saving data from multiple data sources within Macromedia Flash MX. The foundation of this architecture consists of a client-side data management engine represented by the Connector, DataSet, and Resolver components. Working together, these components provide developers with a complete workflow for data management on the client. This workflow provides the following major aspects of a sophisticated application framework: Model-View-Controller for user interface management and synchronization, flexibility of data source interaction, and intelligent updates (see Figure 1). Firefly provides developers with several data-aware visual components, such as the Grid, ComboBox, and EditBox. These components plug in seamlessly to the Firefly DataSet to allow users to view and edit their data. As the data is edited, the DataSet is updated and records the changes. Multiple visual
