Lesson 13. External Data Connections

One of Macromedia Flash's most useful features is its capability to communicate with external sources, sending data to and receiving data from other locations. This makes Flash a powerful application development tool: It enables you to perform tasks such as loading news dynamically, facilitating user login and registration, and building Flash chat applications.

In this lesson, we'll show you various ways in which Flash can send and receive data. You'll use this knowledge to build a simple Flash polling application that enables you to vote for a movie and displays the poll results, a journal that saves entries to your hard drive, and a Web services application that helps you to translate English text into several other languages.

You will build this language translator application, which demonstrates how easy it is to plug into a Web service to send data to and retrieve data from a third-party source.