Paul Colton has ported my Flash 8 wood texture code to AFLAX. It's amazing that it works so well. He must have figured out some sneaky, under-the-hood code to make it work (sneaky in a good way). Still blows my mind.

In addition to creating typical Flash movies, here's another possible use for AFLAX: Flash Forms for PHP (or ASP.NET for that matter).

Until recently, I had no idea what Flash Forms were. But a couple nights ago, I attended an mmsug meeting where Derek Versteegen demonstrated some work he's done with Flash Forms and how they work.

Flash Forms are similar to Flex. The swf is created on the fly on the server. The difference between these swf files and regular swf files is analagous to the difference between dynamically generated html and static html. The dynamically generated swf has content based on the execution of the page's ColdFusion logic and database lookups. Each user gets a unique swf (I think).

The resulting web page looks pretty good. The flash form is nicely integerated with the html. And of course the flash form is much nicer than an html form. (Derek's form had multiple tabs which substituted for multiple html form pages).

I think something similar could be done with AFLAX.

Although AFLAX does not literally generate unique swfs for the user, php could dynamically generate the JavaScript that drives the AFLAX swf. It would amount to the same thing.

With some new JavaScript and PHP libraries combined with AFLAX, we could have open-source Flash Forms for PHP.