Mike points out that Macromedia has made available an ActionScript class that will parse the XML feed into a DataProviderClass "which makes it pretty easy to use", quote Mike Chambers.

There is also an example there of how you make sure that you are able to load the XML newsfeed from the Macromedia site, as far as I can tell what he is doing in CFML is a regular redirect from a local domain url to Macromedia's URL.

Since Macromedia isn't showing the code for PHP, ASP or Perl - I thought I would show it..

The workaround to be able to access data from domains outside the security constraints of Flash is to redirect to the source data from your local domain. Here are some examples added to the Macromedia example. First the Macromedia example with ColdFusion:

Make a CF file and then point to this local file, to get access to the remote content on the url shown in the source below:

<cflocation url=" http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml"/>

For PHP:
<?php
header("location: http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml");
?>

ASP:
<%
Response.Redirect ("http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml")
%>

Perl:
print "Location: http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml\n\n";

Adding JSP and Python since Mike commented on them (I am not going near Pascal (can it even be done in Pascal?) and assembly), a little unsure about these two - so please let me know if this is the wrong way of doing it - or if there are better ways:

JSP:
response.sendRedirect("http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml");

Python:
raise 'Redirect','http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml'

And if you want to do it with ActionScript in ColdFusion MX, Mike has the solution for that.

Its important to note that most of these scripts will only work if they are executed before any other output of the pages they are in.

I hope Chris will be celebrating with some sparklies today, even if its only some sparkly water.

Flazoom is Chris MacGregors baby in many ways. And over two years it has accumulated a lot of knowledge about Flash and Usability. Chris was in many ways ahead of his time when he launched Flazoom as a weblog 2 years ago. He and the other co-editors of Flazoom has really been busy the last two years. 1400 reviews and news items translates to approximately 4 postings every single day, and most of the content - if not all, has been of very high quality.

Cheers Chris, and congratulation with 2 great years!

The Flash Enabled book site has been launched. Its all in Flash, and looks great. I miss some sample chapters from the book, but otherwise the site seems to give good insight into what the book covers - giving brief descriptions of each chapter. The site also contains the important extra files to check out while reading the book. You will need the book to get access to the files though.

For more on the Flash Enabled book, check out my previous post.

This is cool, Jon Udell used the W3C's XSLT transformation service to convert the XML newsfeed from Macromedia to an RSS feed with the help of an XSLT stylesheet

In my opinion, Macromedia should make their feeds available as RSS 1.0 and 0.91 or 0.92 - and possibly a number of other formats. Shouldn't be a big deal to do - and would make the feed more available than it is today. I am especially missing a category definition in the feed, being able to filter the newsfeed to only the information I am interested in is pretty important. (And even more so when its a Flash resource site that is going to use it). Macromedia could also fix it by making available channels for each of their products.

[Update: As Mike pointed out, the XML newsfeed from Macromedia does indeed contain categories, I stand corrected].

eat orange :: 100% vitamin c

Is not about oranges, but rather another Flash blog on the horizon. Thanks to my frequently updated referer logs (still trying to figure out if I should make it available), I spotted this new Radio weblog. Seems like it could become an interesting place, especially with Sean Voisen's interests:

I'll be posting links to information and tutorials on whatever "new-fangled" technology interests me most at the given time. Right now, this seems to be Macromedia MX technologies, the Jabber XML protocol, and Cocoa/Obj-C. But, look for this to change at any time.

I think Flash MX and Jabber is an interesting combination, and would love to see Sean tinker with that.. :-)

Scott Andrew is a guy that always has lots of interesting knowledge to share about Flash, XML, JavaScript, DHTML etc. And he is also using Movable Type for his weblog. I just discovered that he has put together a few Movable Type hacks, very nice :-)

I just installed the «Search Link Shortcuts» which adds buttons to easily add links to Google search, dictionary search and Amazon search, so now you all know the reason for those kind of links poping up in the time to come :-)