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GCN Home > 02/23/04 issue

Park Service turns to animation in the flash

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Macromedia Flash, largely known as a Web page animation tool, is delivering lightweight Web applications for a regional unit of the National Park Service.

Chris Marvel, lead planner and webmaster with the service’s Intermountain Region, has found Flash animation effective for sharing information with 3,800 employees spread across 89 locations.

Marvel designed one Flash application, the Park$ Budget Reporting System, to display the annual budgets of the different parks and offices. With only a browser, a user can log in to the agency intranet and call up a viewer showing the budget information. It displays a snapshot of what money is allocated, what adjustments have been made, how much has been spent and how much remains for the current fiscal year.

“I was able to replace 16 templates with one Flash movie,” Marvel said.

That data used to be difficult to access, Marvel said. Often users would have to phone the individual in charge of the budget to get a spreadsheet or make a database query, which quickly become outdated.

Live data

The Flash app draws live data from Structured Query Language databases, so offices can see a more accurate picture of their finances.

“Our budgeting is very complicated,” Marvel said. “This helps everybody at each park look at the same numbers.”

A self-taught programmer, Marvel said the Macromedia environment was easy to use.

Flash Remoting MX, an application server gateway, connects Flash clients to a ColdFusion server, also from Macromedia Inc. of San Francisco, which packages the database figures.

The Flash environment keeps things to a minimum size, Marvel said. The budget reporting application is only 59K in size and requires no client software other than a Flash player in the user’s browser—a 300K file.

The application is one of many that Marvel has built for the InsideIntermountain Intranet Portal with ColdFusion or Flash. Marvel also developed software for tracking the progress of various projects that locate expert divers or recruit volunteers.

“We would like to move a lot of our stuff into small widgets that really home in on individual apps for people,” Marvel said.

The applications and ColdFusion server software run under Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server on dual-processor Dell PowerEdge servers.

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