[thelist] Flash experts? Flash and Ajax?

Ian Anderson ian at zstudio.co.uk
Fri Dec 23 18:33:15 CST 2005


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!

Flash does indeed have the facility to work in this way, and has done 
for a long time. It even has the ability to open live socket connections 
given the right stuff on the server, though this may not be relevant to 
your case.

You can send and receive standard get or post variables from within the 
movie, or XML data, without reloading the page/movie. In many ways, the 
recent crop of AJAX deployments is simply catching up with stuff that 
Flash apps have been doing for some time.

All you need to do is have a script on the server you can ping with or 
without data, and return either name=value pairs to populate variables, 
or an XML DOM tree, which can then be navigated using ActionScript. In 
either case, you can use the information to generate or manipulate flash 
objects that have complex event-driven interactions.

I've used this integrated with PHP/MySQL and presumably it's a similar 
exercise with Ruby.

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.

Hope this helps

Cheers

Ian



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