I’m really hoping someone here can give me good news. I work as a programmer for a County government in the States. Since I have Studio MX 2004 I’ve been given a new assignment that requires me to finally learn Flash MX 2004. Up to now I’ve only been using Dreamweaver and Firefox (well and Contribute 2).
Anyway the project is for our online campsite reservations system. The users want me to put a map of the campgrounds that will show available campsites in green and reserved sites in red. The reservation data is stored in an MS SQL Server database.
I’ve been hunting around for tutorials or how-tos on using databases with Flash MX 2004 and have come up with zip for helpful results. Everything I’ve found looks to be telling me that I need Flash MX 2004 Professional and a Coldfusion server. Is this true? I mean I’m sure it’d be easier but is it neccessary?
Any suggestions? Sites, books, etc. that would tell me if I can do this with the tools that I’ve got (we don’t have the budget to upgrade).
First this, Flash doesn’t connent to database itself. I use coldfusion to make this connection. How it works is that flash gets the query to coldfusion and then coldfusion takes it to database… What ever the result comes out of this query goes back to coldfusion and then it get passed to flash.
Unfortunately ColdFusion isn’t an option for me right now (and probably not for at least a year). As a County organization we have an extremely fixed budget and it’s allocated for the year already.
I did manage to find a page that explained that Flash needed a “go-between” to actually get the data and put it into a format usable by Flash. That example used an external .txt file and then moved up to an access database using ASP to query the data and format it for Flash. That’s the route that it looks like I’ll have to go (substituting the Access mdb with the SQL database anyway). I just have to try it to see if it works for non-Professional version of Flash MX 2004. So I’ve gotten a baby-step start at least.
Now I guess my question morphs into a question of the differences between Basic and Professional versions of Flash MX 2004. Are there any that I should be aware of that will trip me up when it comes to creating a database front-end? Maybe issues with Actionscript differences between the two?
If you’re server is PHP capable - look into this source http://www.amfphp.com . Its an open source (free) php remoting package. Also, I just was on another thread where a person posted a php script that will get data from a mySQL database, and convert it / pass it to flash as XML. ( http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1801424#post1801424 ) Lots of people are doing it this way because you can find scripts to convert most databases into xml - then you call that script from flash as if you’re loading xml.
ColdFusion and PHP are both pretty much out of the question right now and probably for the long term.
I’ve been able to discern that I need to use something to query the data and format and output that Flash can read. The route that it looks like I’ll go is to use and ASP application to be the data intermediary for Flash.
But my question still remains as to the differences between basic Flash MX 2004 and Professional for this type of application. What are the differences between Flash Pro and Flash Basic?
Unfortunately ColdFusion isn’t an option for me right now (and probably not for at least a year). As a County organization we have an extremely fixed budget and it’s allocated for the year already.