Book excerpt: Flash movies—the ones that play and then, well...stop—are all well and good. They are great as platforms for cartoonists and motion type artists to showcase their stuff. But it's the non-interactive and uninterruptable aspect of these Flash events that has led to some serious underestimations of the power of Flash. All you need to do to begin creating the cutting-edge Flash web-sites of the future is learn how to get the most out of ActionScripting, how to hook up your Flash movie with client/server coding and begin working with a back-end database. And it really is that easy! Suddenly, the world of true Flash functionality is at your fingertips. Flash 5 Dynamic Content Studio is written by a collective of Flash 5 experts who will show you everything you need to know to upgrade your Flash 5 knowledge to Flash 5 expertise. Assuming a basic knowledge of Flash, the book gives you a thorough grounding in ActionScripting techniques, teaches you the basics of a myriad of scripting languages and their Flash interaction capabilities, discusses and implements client-side/server-side interaction, explains the middleware that can make your life considerably easier (Ultradev, Generator, Swift Generator, ASP Turbine), and demonstrates database interaction and usability (Access, SQL, and MYSQL). To conclude this admittedly tough but not prohibitive learning curve, the book walks you through a selection of fairly generic real world case studies, using Flash with middleware and database connectivity, demonstrating how these elements come together to give you truly dynamic, interactive Flash sites. This book is about visual richness and utility. This Web business is getting beautiful, and Flash is getting useful. What you’ll learnWho this book is for Flash 5 Dynamic Content Studio addresses the growing market of web artists under pressure to learn the finer points of interactive design with Flash 5. This book demonstrates the best tools for integrating dynamic content using a Flash front-end. Readers will see how to link Flash movies, via a middleware bridge, through to a back-end datastores (images and/or text). This book assumes that the reader already knows the fundamentals of creating Flash movies, but doesn't assume any programming knowledge at all. The book covers ActionScripting, (of course!), ASP, PHP, JSP, Perl, CGI, Cold Fusion, Macromedia Generator, ASP Turbine, Swift Generator, and Macromedia Ultradev.