Rich Internet Applications is the new buzz-phrase for Web 2.0, and a key component of the substance behind Web 2.0 is Adobe Flash. Learn how to integrate Flash movies into your application and generate Flash movies dynamically using the Ming library.

They start with a brief look at Flash and how its embedded into a web page, including the needed HTML. From there, they jump right into Ming.

They create a sample Flash file - a "Hello World" - to get the ball rolling. They modify it a bit and create some moving text of varying colors. Next up is working with shapes and lines, and finally - importing and using images in your simple PHP-generated Flash animation.

The first idea is of course not to reinvent the wheel and search for an already-made solution. I had to find a really good way to extract information from a SWF file. I had two trivial ways to go : (a) find an already-made SWF Header Extractor, or (b) work at the binary level.

At first, of course, I turned to the PHP documentation (http://www.php.net/manual/en/) and found out the LibSWF and Ming libraries as candidates.

Of course, the code is provided for his solution, and it's actually quite simple. The class does the hard work of mapping out the data from the Flash file's header. All he needed to do was to reference that value in the result under the 'fps' array key.