Creating a Web Poll in Flash MX 2004: Pt. 3 Support

In part one of this series, we created a simple web poll application. The poll displayed a question and responses taken from an external source – either a text file, XML file or database.  In part two, we recorded the vote and displayed a simple chart. We also looked at how the results could be updated. In these two parts, we based our code on functions written in AS2.0.

In the final tutorials in this series, we are going to create the application but this time, we'll use classes in ActionScript 2.0. So, if you're looking to get started in this area, look no further than this tutorial and the one following! We'll use the same web poll application but to simplify things, we'll focus on using an Access database to provide the content.

Creating your own classes is a great approach to writing code in ActionScript. It allows you to create blocks of code that you can easily reuse throughout your work. If you work in a team, it also allows designers and developers to work separately on the same Flash project.

For this tutorial, you'll need some kind of web server and a server-side language like PHP, Cold Fusion, ASP or ASP.NET. Because I'm an ASP developer, the examples in this tutorial use VB.NET. My own computer is set up to use IIS 5 as the Web server and it has the .NET 1.1 framework installed.

You can download the files for this tutorial from the blue Properties box that contains the article PDF. There's a heading titled Code Download and you can click the Details link next to it to get the zip file. It contains the source files you'll need for the tutorial as well as the completed files.