Questions about website development

[alanschu]

A couple of friends of mine are making a webpage (just for their own fun with blogs and activities and silly links).

 

They have asked me for help with two things which I, admittedly, have limited experience with!

 

 

The first is a very beginner tutorial for Illustrator. The artist from the team is very good, but not familiar with Illustrator and was given a copy of it. Are there any easy to use tutorials out there for her to use that doesn't make too many assumptions about what tools to use?

 

 

The second one is Flash. Now I know how to program, though I've never used Flash. I wouldn't mind learning so I have expressed an interest in helping them with any Flash type stuff they want to do (I think right now just making flash videos, but I'm not 100% sure at the moment).

 

Looking at the Adobe Flash page the two tools I saw were Flex 3 and Flash CS 4 Professional (to use with ActionScript). Flex 3 has a trial period, but it ultimately looks like both copies are (appropriately) products for sale.

 

If anyone has any Flash experience, let me know!

 

 

EDIT: P.S. Finally have internet restored! Wahoo!

Edited May 14, 2009 by alanschu

[Pidesco]

Moved to the right forum.

 

Welcome back Alan!

[Spider]

I have some flash experience, but it's been a while. The programming part is fairly simple (depending on what you need to do of course) and if you're experienced with googling for programming solutions it shouldn't be a problem at all.

 

Flash is very fun to work with.

[LostStraw]

The Flex SDK is free to use and download. It's Adobe's Flex IDE that costs money but there are free ones that work fairly well. I'm currently using Flash Develop to learn Action Script 3 and Flex to make some simple games -- I'm still very much a beginner though.

 

Flex is geared more at programmers and web applications while Flash is geared more at artists and animations.

[alanschu]

Coolio thank you!

[LostStraw]

Ah, something I just remembered -- you might be able to get Flex Builder for free if you qualify as an 'education customer'. I didn't see any but I'm not sure if there are extra licensing restrictions on it like Microsoft's education discounted products.

 

https://freeriatools.adobe.com/flex/

Edited May 15, 2009 by LostStraw

[alanschu]

Interesting! Thanks for that too.

 

 

Also reading up on AJAX, PHP, etc. etc.

 

I have some "web" based experience with Apache and JSPs as well which might help. I believe my friend's webhosting supports MySQL and PHP. I need to look into it.

[alanschu]

I am trying to get Javascript to issue a POST command to the PHP page, with limited luck thusfar.

 

 

The form I have DOES work if I use the 'action' tag with POST (which takes me to the .php file directly....not what I want).

 

 

Instead, utilizing an onClick to a Javascript function using an XmlHttpObject works when I don't have parameters to add, but when I try sending the parameters, no dice!

 

 

Anyone have any ideas?

[samm]

Things that might help you:

http://www.ajaxf1.com/tutorial/ajax-php.html?page=2

and mainly

http://www.pixel2life.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29905

 

 

If your file is a php file already, you can use the action attribute of the form tag (not action tag ) to redirect to the file itself, and catch all the post stuff in it. But I suppose you only want one div or something to reload, not the entire page, and use AJAX for that purpose.

Edited May 21, 2009 by samm

[alanschu]

I'm not sure exactly what the problem was (I think it was with the form), but I restarted from scratch and was able to get it to work.