[Sussex] Flash development

[Simon Dawson]

OK James - easy answers to 1 and 2.  3 I haven't investigated yet but from what I've
heard they seem to be OK.  4 a bit of info.

The simple answers to 1 and 2 are, yes, you can do what you wish.  Flash is very good at retrieving
data in an asynchronous manner.  The flash movie basically operates like any other
front end - be it HTML, GTK etc but you can control very easily the different sections of the user interface so that
it behaves much more like a traditional desktop app rather than a web app.
AJAX with HTML goes some way to addressing this for standard web HTML pages
but is far more clunky than the Flash version.  The function you want to research is LoadVars and this can 
be initiated by a user action, timer or whatever.  Listeners can be set up to respond to when data is returned via 
LoadVars and therefore you get an intereactive app.

As far a 2 goes - yes you have most data structures like arrays and user defined object collections
so you should be able to what you wish with the data.

As far as versions of Flash goes - Flash MX should be your minimum and works pretty well under Wine.

There are a number of websites that help but none that I can remember standing out.  The best book to learn
the programming features and which is targetted towards developers rather than designers that I have seen is 
'Object Oriented Programming with ActionScript' by Branden Hall and Samuel Wan (ISBN 0-7357-1183-6) available 
from Amazon market place @ £17.70

Hope this helps.
regards
Simon

On Thursday 26 April 2007 10:26, James Smith wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Righto, here goes. I'm an experienced coder, but I've never done any
> flash, so I'm only just starting out and trying to work out what I can
> do and what I need in order to do it. Bear with me :)
> 
> 1) I need to create a "graph viewer" which can display a set of data
> which is fetched via an HTTP request from a web server. Can you do
> HTTP requests for such remote data within the Flash file?
> 
> 2) Does Flash have the sort of capabilities I need to do a bit of
> analysis on this data (just some simple maths and array manipulation
> really)? This would be very useful as it would reduce load on the
> server, which wouldn't have to do the actual data analysis.
> 
> 3) Are there open source compilers/tools, and if so, what would you
> recommend? Ideally I don't want to shell out for the Adobe Flash dev
> environment thing if I don't need to.
> 
> 4) This is my main problem really - are there any basic introductions
> to developing Flash which anyone can recommend? I've looked around,
> but not managed to find anything which makes it particularly easy to
> get into... otherwise, are there any books you'd recommend?
> 
> cheers,
> James
> 
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Simon Dawson

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