Preface: I am 100% new to the Flash and ActionScript world, doing research for a potential project.
Is it realistic to design a tool that could import a number of raster and vector formats, then convert them to a medium that can be used by a Flash application? Practically speaking, I’m looking into designing a Flash web application that lets users upload files (particularly in vector) and manipulate them on-screen (for now, just moving them around, nothing crazy).
A fair amount of the problem is converting from the specific vector format into the desired format. My question is really this: what is the format I should be attempting to convert them into for manipulation in my application? These files do not need to be redownloaded – they go up, get converted, get translated into a byte array, then stuck in a database for retrieval.
Ideally I would do conversion on the Flash application, depending on how easy it end up being. That said, also looking into doing it on the web-service end that sticks it in a database (in whatever language I choose to power that).
Any thoughts?
You can do pretty much everything with raster images, but vectors will be a problem. There’s a SVG library (http://code.google.com/p/as3svgrendererlib/) that will do for basic stuff. As for other vector formats… well, you’d have to write your own parsers.