Chapter 12: Server-Side Support for Flash: Highscore Boards

Overview

Flash has the ability to talk to the Web server from which your .swf was first loaded. For example, a Web surfer might come along and look at your Web page, which has an .swf of a game you made. Your game can obtain more data from the Web server that is hosting your site while the game is being played . That means you can load things on a "need now" basis to save overall transmission size .

There are also other things you can do with the server. You can send information to the server for processing to implement highscore boards or persistent games in which a user logs in to pick up where he left off.

Loading resources only when you need them and communicating information to the server for storage are the kinds of things we're going to do in this chapter. I hope to give you a good starting point so that you know what is possible and how to go about planning the implementation of something on the server side.

This chapter is broken into four major sections. The first section involves communicating with the server to do things such as load .swf and .jpg files from the server into your Flash movie. The second section looks at preloaders , which show the user the progress of a Flash game that is loading. The third section involves communicating with the browser to redirect it to other Web pages. Finally, the fourth section examines how we go about programming the server to receive, process, store, and retrieve information.