Chapter 14. Generating Flash with PostgreSQL and PHP

Modern Web sites are, to a large extent, generated dynamically. Therefore, the content of such Web sites is usually retrieved from a database. Recently, Flash, PHP, and PostgreSQL have become more popular, so consider using PHP and PostgreSQL to generate dynamic Flash movies.

In the beginning, there was nothing. After the golden ASCII age (I guess all of us will remember those wonderful ASCII art artifacts), simple Web sites were built. Since that time, browsers have been used to display Web sites. A few years ago, animation could be done only with the help of those wonderful high-performance Silicon Graphics machines. Times have changed. and now animations can easily be included in Web sites.

Generating graphics can sometimes be quite a burden . Some of you might already have written user interfaces using a text editor instead of a graphical development environment. If so, you discovered that this kind of work can be very tricky and difficult, because you can easily get lost in hundreds of objects and methods .

Now that you want to create animation, not just static graphics, you might think that this is even more difficult. It's not with Flash. Flash provides a lot of power combined with simplicity. Understanding the basic ideas of Flash is easy ”and so is building basic Flash animations.

Sometimes, however, building Flash movies might not be enough to satisfy your demands. If you want to create database-enabled Web sites, you might find it useful to create Flash movies dynamically. Therefore, programming interfaces have been implemented for many programming languages, such as PHP, Python, and C/C++.

In this chapter, you take a closer look at one of those interfaces and see how Flash can be combined with PostgreSQL to build even more beautiful Web sites. We will also cover geometric objects, because these are a core feature of PostgreSQL.

This chapter is not meant to be a complete reference of the Ming interface. This information should show what can be done with PostgreSQL and other Open Source tools and give you insight into the topic so that you can start building your own applications with the help of the developers reference.