I recently had the opportunity to work on a website that used Flash as the front-end and using LAMP on the backend. At first this seemed like a daunting task, since my Flash experience (outside of creating simple animation tweens and using the software as a drawing tool) was limited to dropping the auto-generated code that Flash generates into an HTML page.
I had no experience whatsoever with interfacing Flash with the server. I was surprised to learn that the task wouldn’t be as difficult as I’d imagined. An SWF file can be set to load data from a server transparently, akin to AJAX’s behavior. The only hint of an HTTP request is seen in the browser’s status bar. Anyway, an SWF can query an XML file (or in my project’s case, XML-output generated via PHP) and parse that into objects that can be displayed to the user.
