Introduction

This tutorial shows you how to create a simple Guest book in Flash.  This Guest book is simple, efficient, fast, and easy to implement. Their are no complicated database or xml issues to worry about.  One swf, one script, and one text file. Put it together and you'll have a great Guest book for your site.  In this example we use a PHP script but after you understand how it works it should be fairly easy to write the same script in Perl, ASP, or Cold Fusion.  With a couple of modifications and some additions to the non-existent administration side you'll be able to create almost anything you want out of it.  For a working example of this please visit: http://www.flash-db.com/GuestBookTut/

Theory:

This Guest Book works by storing user entered information in a text file.  The script that is used organizes the data according to when it was entered, in a way that the newest entries are always first.  All of the entries are separated by a pattern that the script later splits into an array.  The array is then manipulated according to commands sent from the Flash movie.  In this way we can organize the data that is returned to the flash movie.  The script returns a fixed amount of data back to the flash movie at one time (default is 10 entries), making the time it takes to view the entries minimal.  Their are quite a few modifications that can be added by further manipulating these array's.  Using this technique our simple Text file becomes a database that we can organize, sort, and filter.  Best of all it will work on any server as long as you can run some type of server side script and can change the permissions of a text file.