[thelist] Flash experts? Flash and Ajax?

[Tom Dell'Aringa]

----- Original Message ----
 From: Ian Anderson <ian at zstudio.co.uk>

Tom Dell'Aringa wrote:

> Essentially I want to build the back end with Ruby on Rails and a
> mySQL database. I just am ignorant of how Flash could interact with
> these tech's. Any input is appreciated!

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Flash does indeed have the facility to work in this way, and has done 
for a long time.... In many ways, the 
recent crop of AJAX deployments is simply catching up with stuff that 
Flash apps have been doing for some time.
 
ActionScript is now a very mature language and even includes the ability 
to create and manipulate graphic primitives through scripting. I think 
it's a very reasonable proposition to consider deploying your project in 
Flash.
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 Great - a few follow up questions then. I suppose Flash has the ability to scale incrementally as large groups of users came online (seems to me it would taking into account its current uses.) I seem to remember Actionscript being touted as "almost the same thing" as JavaScript. Is this still/was this ever the case? Or is it just a similarity. Thanks for the input. If anyone can point me to any online games that use Flash that allow concurrent connections of many users, kind of like an rpg, that would be helpful for me to see.
 
 Cheers
 
 Tom