Looking to start a project that would require me to use Flash or Flex (I have not worked with either of these yet, yikes!!!). Flash would be the front end user interface that needs to display items pulled from a MySQL Database (I was thinking ajax via jQuery but open to suggestions). My question is, What would be the best approach for something like this?
High level
Flash calls to display image through ajax/php from Db
I don't know how to code the Flash part, any tutorials that kinda sound like what I'm doing? suggestions? thoughts? other ideas?
Side Note: The database table will contain text that describes the image being passed to flash, so I would like to display both the text and image.
Thanks for any advice/help,
--Phill
I'd recommend you try AMFPHP or ZendAMF. Both of these use AMF3 (which requires you to use Actionscript 3/FlashCS3+), and it is one of the quickest ways to get data into Flash.
You could also use php to generate an xml file and just request that url in Flash to load up the XML. You can also use ajax like you said, but it's probably going to be the slowest method open to you, unless you're working with very small data sets.
Regardless of the method you choose, I'd suggest you use Actionscript 3. It's much faster and if you use XML, it'll be a life saver.
Here's a tutorial about setting up flash to work with PHP & MySQL:
link
Related
I'm thinking about going with Google charts for a project I'm working on. I have all my data on my own server and so I was wondering what is the best way to go about inserting this data into a chart, there are a few alternatives:
Create the DataTable object from data that is provided inline. That is, print all the data into the HTML document. This will crowd out everything else since I have a lot of data, but I don't know if this is important. This way we can avoid one HTTP request.
Dynamically create a .js files for every request, holding the data, and letting it be included with a script tag in the document.
Retrieve the data using ajax (Google suggests this in their documentation)
Using the chartwrapper and adding a datasource pointing to my own server. This would be equivalent to the above, I suppose, and functionally equivalent to (2).
So what is the most common solution? What do you usually solve this?
I wouldnt worry about crowding out your data. Printing it out into a javascript datatable wont be visible to the user, and the browser wont care. However I would suggest you only print out what you need for each page so you dont have more than required.
I think probably any of your solutions are fine, so pick the one that suits you best.
I'm currently writing an application that will extract data from a few different websites to be passed back to my app, parsed, formatted, and displayed. The problem I keep running into is being able to pass in and display the data in a graphical manner. I was hoping to use HTML5 to do this, and all of my scraping is set up in php. Of course, to draw in HTML5 requires using JavaScript, and getting my php output to JavaScript seems messy. Am I missing a better way to architect this solution?
It seems like a good way to me, as good as any, except it's not very backwards compatible, it might be better to do the graphing server side
If you want to do graphics directly in php you may want to look at using GD or ImageMagick.
i have a php script who parser a rss and give me the data in a know pattern. Im very new with ASP, JavaScript and Jquery so i dont have any idea of how to autoupdate the script and display the new data with a smooth animation (see this example, that exactly what i want). Thanks for the support and if you know a good script to made this i will appreciate it.
Seems like you're looking for this:
http://leftlogic.com/lounge/articles/jquery_spy2/
It's PHP (not ASP), so that might be an issue, though the code is SUPER easy to implement (I've written by own implementation on three separate occasions).
The site itself has some decent documentation on getting things up and running, but if you need some extra help, comment and I'll point you in the right direction :)
Good luck!
The resources people have linked here are helpful and merely mentioning jQuery means you're probably headed in the right direction. But if you're new to this it might still be worth mentioning some of the concepts you'll be looking to play with here.
First of all, you'll probably want to stick with one language on the client side and one on the server side. This means choosing either PHP or ASP -- this isn't clear from your question but I'll assume you're dealing with PHP since that's the language I use for this kind of thing. JavaScript + jQuery is the right choice for the browser (client) side of things.
Like Luca points out, you'll have to set up some JavaScript code that goes live on page load and "polls" the server at a set interval. In JavaScript you do this using something called XMLHttpRequest (or "XHR") and it's pretty complicated. You could use combination of jQuery and a library like the one Matt points to in his answer, or just jQuery -- sample code abounds but it's basically a loop with a function call and sleep timer.
That function call is going to be one of the more difficult parts if you're trying to emulate the Twitter World Cup site. But here's the basic idea: You need to populate a list using jQuery and a data standard like JSON. Since the RSS feed you'll be parsing is written in XML, you'll have to write a server side (PHP/ASP) script that fetches, parses and converts the feed to JSON. In PHP, this is best done through cURL (file_get_contents() if you're lazy), SimpleXML and json_encode(), respectively.
Your JavaScript should load the list based on JSON. To do this, and display any new items, what you'll do is load the JSON from the client (browser) side using a jQuery method like getJSON(). Then you spin through the array object and add any new items to the list by adding new <li> elements to the "DOM." The same jQuery code that does this can easily also do the cross dissolve with something like fadeIn().
It looks like the script on that example page has an Ajax request running every TOT seconds.
You could simply have your PHP script return the RSS data (in JSON format say) and let JavaScript parse it and generate some HTML with it.
If all of this doesn't make sense to you I advice reading a little about JavaScript and PHP... there's plenty of good books.
how can I pass a string from PHP to Flash?
I need to pass this to flash,
$var = 'uid_'.$uid.'_'.'likes_'.$likes;
Any ideas on how I can accomplish this?
Thanx in advance!
So, your best bet in this case is going to be one of two things:
1) If this is a simple easy solution with a little bit of data that isn't going to see a whole ton of traffic, just have your PHP output an XML file and use Flash's URLLoader() to load in that .xml data - then parse it.
Alternately,
2) If this is going to see some heavy traffic, or if you want to do it the "right" way, look into either ZendAMF or AMFPHP. Lee Brimelow has tutorials for working with this stuff at gotoandlearn.com - basically, you can remote into a PHP Web Service which will return data (not just strings - you can even do typed objects!) as binary data directly into your Flash file.
Either way you're not going to have too much trouble with it - it's a pretty straightforward operation. Let me know if you have any questions.
The simplest way to achieve is to use the well-named flashvars to pass it.
Adobe as a KB about flash HTML parameters http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/127/tn_12701.html
Javascript based flash integration libraries (like swfObject) allow to pass any of these parameters as well.
Have any bridge libraries been developed for PHP that provide access to the jQuery framework? Ideally it would be nice to have something fairly extensible so that creating jQuery-based content using PHP code would be fairly easy and customizeable. Does such a thing exist yet?
pquery
jqpie
jquery-php
There's a warmup list.
So far I've found one that seems to fit the description. I haven't tried it out yet, so if anyone has any feedback or experience with this or other ones don't hesitate to post!
PQuery
jQPie might be what you're after.
What can jQPie do?
Easily request and process data from php using $.getJSON
Inject php generated html into elements using $.(element).load
Call php functions directly from your web pages using $.jqpie
Call jQuery from php in respond to $.jqpie calls
Advanced autocomplete using jqpie_complete
QueryPath (http://querypath.org) is a full implementation of the jQuery DOM/XML/HTML part of jQuery. QueryPath has full CSS 3 selector support (including the stuff jQuery doesn't have, like XML namespace support). It also comes with DB tools, where you can run queries and have the results inserted into the query object. And it has a template engine, too. Like jQuery, you can write custom extensions very easily.
But it definitely takes advantage of its server-side status.
The main project page is at https://fedorahosted.org/querypath. You can download it there (and see lots of examples, including RSS and SVG manipulation).
Integrating with jQuery, then, can be done easily by sending XML data of many sorts down to jQuery. (You could probably send JSON, too... never tried.) And since the server side code and the client side code both look the same, there's less of a need to learn two totally different toolkits.