Adobe Flash for your Graphical Needs
Creating interactive and graphically slick websites using Adobe Flash is probably one of the easiest things to do in web development.
While World Wide Web Consortium has adopted Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to carry in XML like the one that Adobe standard .swf file format has already done. SVG may have its advantages, but users are slow to pick that technology up for some reasons.
Firstly, no one in the right mind will want to create graphical interfaces using a notepad. That would be an insane thing to do and it’s just not a feasible thing to do. Imagine the manpower needed just to code a simple navigational menu with it.
Secondly, the omnipresence of flash players in every default browsers gives flash the advantage of being the popular choice in playing .swf files. It is also platform neutral in every sense. It can run on almost any operating system and browsers without the slightest bit of error; it is a good sign for designers, who will no longer need to double-check for abnormalities in the graphic renders.
Finally, the embrace of the open SWF format by third parties, most notably for our purposes the open-source community, has resulted in the creation of a growing number of tools for generating and manipulating SWF files, even on-the-fly by, for example, PHP. Tools like Ming (yes, Flash and Ming are now friends!) and FreeMovie make it possible for open-source web application developers to add some interest to their browser-bound interfaces.
Add to this the responsiveness Macromedia has shown in extending Flash with some things the development community needed, and you can start to see what makes Flash compelling way to develop your web applications front-end. ActionScript was added to allow programmers to communicate with Flash "movies" and recently ActionScript was extended with so-called "remoting" components which allow Flash movies to interact directly with various web application servers. Another Open-Source project, AMFPHP, extends Flash remoting to PHP.
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