Linkzone - Flash

Contrary to what you might think, Flash isn't just all tweensand motion blurs. The application comes with powerful data-retrievalcapabilities, which allow you to hook your Flash movie clips up to adatabase (or any other external data source) and dynamically build movieclips that are easy to update and modify. Find out more, in this roughguide to the data-driven Flash universe.

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By: The Disenchanted Developer, (c) Melonfire

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July 23, 2002

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TOOLS YOU CAN USE

And that's about all I have time for. In this article, I introduced you to data-driven Flash applications, demonstrating how you can use a database and a server-side script in combination with the new data retrieval capabilities in Flash 5 to dynamically construct Flash movies. I also showed you a couple of simple examples, including a database-driven Flash news ticker and a dynamically-constructed Flash menu.

However, building Flash movies from a database is only the tip of the iceberg. Flash comes with a number of tools that allow you to add new types of interactivity to your movies, including creating forms capable of accepting user input and parsing XML data sources. I'll be discussing these capabilities in detail in upcoming articles - but until then, chew on these links, and I'll see you soon!

Macromedia's Flash resource center, at http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/productinfo/tutorials/

Flash 101, at http://www.melonfire.com/community/columns/trog/archives.php?category=Fl ash

FlashKit, at http://www.flashkit.com/

Virtual-FX, at http://www.virtual-fx.net/

Webmonkey's Flash section, at http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/multimedia/shockwave_flash/

Note: All examples in this article have been tested on Macromedia Flash 5.0. Examples are illustrative only, and are not meant for a production environment. Melonfire provides no warranties or support for the source code described in this article. YMMV!