Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

ff06: day three

I’m a little behind in my recapping…

My “monolith” moment of the day came in John Davey’s Flash/MySQL session, where he demonstrated how to hook Flash up to a MySQL database using PHP as an intermediary.

It was actually more like a “duh” moment. The solution was so simple — set up PHP files that do specific database calls, then print/echo the results of that call, and have Flash do a basic LoadVars to call in those PHP files — that I can’t believe that I hadn’t thought of it sooner for my own projects. I don’t know how complicated the data types can be with this imported data, but I suppose it’s all just a matter of experimenting and seeing what I can do with it.

I also found inspiration from David Garrett Nantz’s Flash video session, where he showcased some of the commercial Web projects he’s worked on (including the site for the upcoming movie The DaVinci Code) and explained a bit how the sites were done.

Other highlights from the day’s sessions: Sho Kuwamoto’s Flex session, which has me even more curious about the development framework, and Lawrence Lessig’s session about Creative Commons and Internet remix culture.