macromedia flash sitedesign: hi, i'm making an all flash website and it needs to be somewhat dynamic...something flash seems to be lacking

anyway, currently i have dynamic text boxes loading external text files for current news and whatnot, is there any way to make it a bit more secure than just using text files?

At the moment, I am working with PHP pages, which query a MySQL database for the information, format it as basic XML, then return that to my flash sites. I'm having text issues of another nature, but the XML feeds seem to be working fine. I am going to try and implement hitting those PHP pages over HTTPS for a little added warm and fuzzy feeling. :)

Dahgu...

unfortunately, i don't have permission for db access

Do they support any server side scripting? (i.e. Perl, CGI, PHP, ASP, etc.)

Dahgu...

yes

I am guessing that your security concern is that if the data files are out there for Flash to pull, someone could simply snag that file if they knew the URL. What I did to solve that before was to place the data files outside the public_html folder my hosting provider gave me. That made it so that the files were totally unavailable to any web browsing clients. Next, I had a PHP web page that accepted a username and password in the query string, which was sent by the Flash application. If that password and username was correct, the PHP page did nothing but access that data file that was outside the public_html folder and return the entire file to Flash. It worked great and prevented anyone from getting to those datafiles by simply specifying the URL. The protection was not earth shattering, but it was exponentially better than having my data files swinging in the wind, so to speak.

So, should you be able to use a scripting language, and you can place your existing text data files outside of your web-accessibile directory, then you could mess around with this idea. I am sure there are many ways to do it, but I had to get creative fast. Good luck!