Question

i have a few questions about flash web sites.

1. are their “pages” done using frames? is that the only way?

2. for login/access control, is setting variables to indicate login secure? is there a way to use PHP Sessions like in regular PHP sites? or will it be the same as flash variables?

Answer 1

flash web sites are usually applications, that are loaded once, and then display all the content … so navigation is within the loaded swf …

there are two different approaches … either the site content is loaded from a server, using XML, url variables (&ident1=value1&ident2=value2…), or plain text (which in turn may represent a custom format, such as JSON, CSV etc.) … or the subpages are swfs, that will be simply loaded into the main swf when needed … the first approach is cleaner and much more flexible though … you should not use the second approach, unless your content is static or rarely updated …

when it comes to sessions/login, this is something, you will need to handle yourself … you will need some kind of login.php, that will allow authentication and session creation … login would look something like login.php?user=username&password=userpassword … and it should return a session id and maybe a status, thus "&success=1&sid=somesessionid" on success and "&success=0" on failure … any further actions/loading operations would then go to other php-files, and would look like someAction.php?sid=somesessionid&param1=value1... … in your php you would then check against the sid (usually stored in a database) … you could, in theory, use php sessions as well, but this is a little more tricky …

for XML, use the XML class, for url variables, use LoadVars, and callback onLoad, for plain text or custom formats, use LoadVars and onData … look them up in the language reference … and appart from that, AMFPHP is worth mentioning … have a look at it …

good luck then … 😉

greetz

back2dos