Building Data-Driven Flash Movies (
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Contrary to what you might think, Flash isn't just all tweens
and motion blurs. The application comes with powerful data-retrieval
capabilities, which allow you to hook your Flash movie clips up to a
database (or any other external data source) and dynamically build movie
clips that are easy to update and modify. Find out more, in this rough
guide to the data-driven Flash universe.So you've figured out the basics of the Flash toolbox, created your first tween,
and added some wild animation to your Web site. You've built animation clips
with fading reverbs, and created buttons which change shape as you mouse over
them. And you're wondering what to do next.
Well, wonder no more.
While there's a lot you can do with the tools Flash gives you, it's when
you hook it up to the wild and wacky world of the Web that you truly begin to
appreciate the power (and genius) of the application. Today's Web is built
around dynamic, data-driven Web sites, and Flash, which comes with built-in
capabilities to read data from a variety of data sources, is well-suited to it.
The new data retrieval features in Macromedia Flash 5 (and better) allow
developers to retrieve information from server-side databases and use this
information to dynamically construct animation clips on the fly. As you might
imagine, this opens up new possibilities for the creative Web developer, and
sets the tone for a new generation of smart, dynamic and very cool Web
applications.
In this article, I'm going to give you a little preview,
demonstrating how Flash can be hooked up to a MySQL database to dynamically
construct database-driven animation clips. Most of these examples are fairly
simple - you might even find them *too* simple - but they should serve as a
gentle introduction to the new capabilities Flash gives you, and perhaps even
help to answer that "what next?" question by sparking some ideas in that tangled
web of neurons you call a brain. So strap yourself in tight - this is gonna be
an exciting ride!
