flashsolediter.exe Graphical data using Flash

by Bryan Mattern 一木Translation
Introduction to SWF and Flash
SWF is the file format used by Macromedia Flash to deliver pictures, animations and sounds to users on the Internet. Flash enables you to provide a rich and dynamic interface to users. About 90% of Web users can browse SWF content without installing a browser plug-in, and more than 200 million people have downloaded Flash players. Macromedia released the SWF specification in April 1998. Add SWF support to PHP4.
The built-in ability of PHP to dynamically generate images is a feature that attracts me. It can generate reports and interfaces that look more professional and comfortable. In the beginning, I used various GD codes that are littered around the web to create images to display data from my different projects. But I soon became annoyed by the uncertainty of the generated images and decided to try to see if I could solve the problem using vector graphics. I think you'll agree, the results look much better. If a picture can represent a thousand words, imagine what a Flash animation represents?
I will try to keep this example as simple as possible and only talk about the basics. My purpose is just to create a Drog in that holds GIF and PNG images generated by GD. You can add extensions and enhancements to it, such as the various visual effects that Flash is famous for. For example, you can make graphics fade in, fly when the page loads, or dynamically display a few snowflakes. Your imagination is the only limit to PHP's SWF functions.
How to obtain the data that needs to be graphed is best left to the reader as an exercise. Because this article is about dynamically creating Flash files, I will use an imaginary table as a data set in the example to create a graphical view of it. You need to examine your data and decide which chart format is most appropriate. In most cases, a pie chart is a suitable choice, and this is the chart format my examples will take. Line, column or area charts can be created in a similar way.
In this example, suppose we send some packages to several cities, and we want to look at the proportion of packages received in each city. We decided to store the data in the table "city" of the database "world". Let's first create the table and enter the data required for this example.
#
# Table structure for table 'city'
#
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS city;
CREATE TABLE city (
 city_id int(14) NOT NULL auto_increment,
 city_name varchar(255) NOT NULL,
 city_timestamp timestamp(14) ,
 PRIMARY KEY (city_id)
);
#
# Dumping data for table 'city'
#
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '1', 'London', '20000917122625');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '2 ', 'London', '20000917122626');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '3', 'London', '20000917122626');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '4', 'London', '20000917122627');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '5', 'Paris', '20000917122631');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '6', 'Paris', '20000917122632');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '7', 'New York ', '20000917122644');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '8', 'New York', '20000917122645');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '9', 'New York', '20000917122646');
INSERT INTO city ​​VALUES( '10', 'New York', '20000917122646');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '11', 'New York', '20000917122647');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '12', 'Hong Kong ', '20000917122654');
Configure your system to use SWF
The environment I use is RedHat Linux6.2, Apache 1.3.12, PHP 4.0.2 (compiled as an Apache module). If you're using PHP in Windows, things are a little different. You need to download or compile a Flash Dll, but there is no need to modify the code.
PHP provides the ability to create Shockwave Flash files through Paul Haeberli's libswf module. You need to download libswf from http://reality.sgi.com/grafica/flash/. Then, you need to configure PHP using the option --with-swf[=DIR], where DIR is the directory where the include and lib directories are located. There must be a swf.h file in the include directory, and a libswf.a file must be in the lib directory. When unzipping the downloaded libswf distribution, these two files will be unzipped into the same directory. You need to move these two files to the correct location. After completion, the directory structure should be as below:
/usr/local/sWF/
/
/
SWF.H
/
libswf.a
/fonts
... 🎜 to enable the SWF function to work normally , you need to copy the /usr/local/swf/fonts/ directory so that the web server can access it (for apache and mod_php, the best way is to use an absolute path and copy the above directory to apache's document root Down.) In addition, there is a small c program in the release version of libswf that can convert type 1 fonts into fonts that can be used by Flash.
Because we need to dynamically create and write SWF files, the web server needs to have write permissions in the directory where the files are stored.

The above introduces flashsolediter.exe using Flash to graphical data, including the content of flashsolediter.exe. I hope it will be helpful to friends who are interested in PHP tutorials.