Foundation XML for Flash

Flash is Macromedia's highly popular web content creation tool, completely ubiquitous throughout the web due to the high availability of it's player plug-in for most web browsers. XML is a completely platform agnostic data medium. Flash is able to make use of XML data, which is very useful when you are creating Rich Internet Applications - it allows you to populate Flash web interfaces with data from pretty much any source that supports XML as a data medium, be it databases, raw XML files, or more excitingly, .Net applications, web services, and Microsoft Office applications such as Excel and Word! This book is likely to be very big because of the Microsoft connection - MS Office is ubiquitous throughout the world of IT, and many companies want to be able to easily port their data from Office files to web interfaces. Microsoft is also very keen to get in on the Rich Internet Applications craze that Flash is such a big part of. In this book, Sas Jacobs first takes the reader through just the information they need to know about XML itself, and no more - what it is, it's syntax, it's associated technologies (such as CSS and XSLT) and how to get XML out of your applications in a format Flash can use. Then she shows how to use the XML object to stream XML data into Flash, and how to use the XMLConnector component and XML Sockets to build advanced Flash/XML applications. Numerous example applications are built throughout the book, including an MP3 player, XML photo gallery, an Excel-driven web catalog, Access and Word-driven content management systems, and an XML-driven chat application. This book will support the new version of Flash, Flash X, available in late 05.