Chapter 20. Browser Communication

In many cases, you may find it necessary to communicate with the browser that contains your application. Browser communication enables you to build applications that go beyond the Flex application itself; you can link to existing sites, communicate with other applications via JavaScript, and enable interaction with your browser’s history, as a start. The ExternalInterface class lets you call out to the browser containing the Flash application, get information about the page, and call JavaScript methods, as well as letting JavaScript methods call into the Flash application. This chapter focuses on the functionality contained within the core Flex Framework, though there are other tools to assist with integration of the browser and the Flash Player—the Adobe Flex Ajax Bridge (FABridge), and Joe Berkovitz’s UrlKit among them.