So, I've been working with Ruby on Rails lately -- which is another discussion entirely -- and I've come to the point where I want to figure out how to embed SWF games into a page.  This research led me to a great little article called "Embedding SWF content with Ruby on Rails " at EleventyTen (which is just a cool name, btw.)

I'm posting here as usual to give myself a future-note on the topic, but also to share a bit.  SWFObject is really sweet and is a MUCH nicer way to handle the ridiculous mess that is the embed-vs-object "thing" for putting SWF movies in your files.

So, consider this an introduction to SWF embeding in Rails, as well as a heads-up on SWFObject since you'll probably want to use that sucker no matter what you're using on the site dev backend!

You're welcome. 

I've got a bit of research left before I get fully underway, but I've been reading through info about the AMFPHP open source Flash Remoting gateway . Cool beans. I don't want to pay for Flash Remoting stuff from Macrodobe since I'm generally not cash-filled and FR is huge-o expensivo to implement from what I've seen.

I have much research about other options that are less expensive than the real thing, but I'm not getting into that. This is my journal, after all, and I'm only up to AMFPHP right now. I'll get the others posted when I get to them, eh?

Here's a clip from their home page, in case you need more info before leaving here:

It’s fast, reliable, 100% free and open-source. Flash Remoting is a technology built into the Flash player core that enables sending data between the server and the client seemlessly. If you've built XML-based RIAs you know how much of a pain it can be to serialize the data, debug, and integrate into your application.With Flash Remoting, you can call remote methods from the Flash client and the arguments will end up in the native remote language, and will come back to Flash correctly typed, so there's no messing with serialization at all.

You also get to use the wonderful NetConnection debugger, which shows you exactly what's being sent between the client and server. Remoting uses AMF, a very lightweight binary format that cuts the bulk out of packets, meaning data exchange is a lot faster than with XML. All in all, Remoting is the way to go if you're looking to build robust, fast and secure Rich Internet Applications.

AMFPHP is a complete implementation of Remoting for PHP with tons of features built-in to make creating Remoting apps a whole lot simpler.

Here's a tutorial that I'm going through along with a few other docs and some books I already own with Remoting info in them:

• Connecting Macromedia Flash and PHP

This white paper, What About Flash? Can We Really Make Games With It? is a great read if you're in the business of developing "casual games" or online games and you've pondered the value of Flash in your life. I've been really strongly researching alternatives to using Flash and Director/Shockwave for online games, but this is a good article showing many details about what Flash offers and where it fails.

I've been working with Flash for a long time now, but only within the last couple years have I really dug into it to see some of the power behind it. I worked with Macromedia Director (yeah, I know it's Adobe now) for a long time and moved to Flash because of clients. I like them both for different things, and I despise each of them for some stuff. This article at least analyzes the product from a non-marketing angle. It's a presentation the author gave at a Game Developers Conference one year and I think it's still pretty complete.

For bigger projects and shareware projects, I'm still considering other tools... but I'll discuss that later. :)