Guidelines regarding developing a flash web-site (especially loading - order swf, xml, etc...) ?

Question

I would like to know, if you people out there could help me out, regarding the best practices or the a better way for creating a flash website... Actually I would like to know whether we should load the xml first and then the swf and other components or the other way round ?

I am bit confused, even if anybody could refer some book to dig upon the steps or most common practices regarding the development... it would of great help...

Thanks

shane amon

Answer 1

That's a very broad question, and is more of a discussion question which is possibly not suitable for Stackoverflow's Question/Answer structure. I can answer some of the specific points you raised though.

If you want a Flash based website which uses XML to load a bunch of external content (external to the swf file itself), then you would need to load the swf first, and then inside the swf you'd need ActionScript which would first load the XML file, then parse it for whatever you're looking for (say paths to images) and finally load those images.

A good place to start would be the docs, as always, and find out about Loader, XML and XMLList classes, in ActionScript 3. Here's the docs, if you've not already found them: http://www.adobe.com/livedocs/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/

Hope that'll be of some help. You're probably best off choosing a small part of the entire website project and attempting to implement it, say a photo gallery, then coming back with any specific questions or problems you run into.

debu