Disclaimer: I’m still learning Flash, and while I’ve had a few college courses over Java, they were years ago (ie, I’ve forgotten almost everything) and they never covered network connections. So, by asking this question, I’m probably revealing just how much I don’t know about these languages, heh.
From everything I can find online, Flash simply has no way to do direct peer to peer connections. One workaround for this seems to be very briefly using a server to authenticate and setup a peer to peer connection, such as Adobe Cirrus. Another workaround is simply not using peer-to-peer, and instead setting up a dedicated server using Java or PHP to communicate between users.
It seems to me, that if you can use Java on a server to communicate between two users, shouldn’t you be able to use Java in your program to directly handle peer-to-peer communications, no server needed?
And, if it’s at least theoretically possible, would someone mind pointing me to a good tutorial on integrating Flash and Java, and using Java to do peer-to-peer? The tutorials and examples I’ve managed to find so far on both subjects haven’t been very illuminating.
Thanks for reading.
