— Shang Liang

Most of my Flash projects use XML as “database” and PHP is my preferred server script.  I found Simple_HTML_DOM Parser quite a good tool for reading and writing XML files. The default DOM in PHP is quite hard to use. The syntax for creating nodes in PHP is very tiring. Besides that, the biggest headache is that the scripts written for PHP 4 are not compatible with PHP 5.

Simple HTML DOM Parser is designed for reading and editing HTML but it works fine with XML files, since XML files are more tidy than HTML. Reading and traversing the XML is easy, just use the find function.

$xml = file_get_html('http://www.google.com/');
foreach($xml->find('img') as $element)
       echo $element;

Writing a new node is not difficult either.

$node = str_get_html('<sample_node>Hello World</sample>');

Previously in Flash CS3, the trick of getting autocompletion in FlashDevelop is not working any more in Flash CS4, ast least not in my case. After testing a while I finally got it working again by setting the swc path of the project.

Choose “Project>>Properties…>>Compiler Options>>SWC Include Libraries” and add the path of AIR swc to it. Most likely it would be something like this: “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash CS4\AIK1.5\frameworks\libs\air\airglobal.swc”

Cheers!