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Typically your first Flash applications are likely to be fairly small in scope. But the scope of projects will grow as your skill set grows, and then it becomes important to take into consideration how you can best manage the content. This chapter explains how to load content and even how to share common content amongst multiple files. There are several primary benefits from these processes:
Loading content means better manageability -
There are plenty of examples that illustrate this point. Consider an example of a gallery of animations. When the gallery contains one or two animations, it is reasonable to manage whilst all the content is within a single file. But as the number of animations grows, it becomes less and less reasonable to have them all contained within a single file. Each time you want to add a new animation you have to open the same .fla file and add new content. That process would not only be unmanageable for a single person, but is notably less manageable for a team of people. Instead, a much more feasible solution is to have a single file that displays the animations while each animation is its own file.
Loading external content makes it much simpler to use dynamic content -
For example, if you have a Flash application that allows the user to search and view products, you may want to consider loading the product images from
external .jpg files rather than embedding them in the .swf file. This has several advantages. If the image needs to change, it is much simpler to switch out the .jpg file than to update the symbol in the .fla and re-export/publish the .swf. Also, if the other content is generated from a database or other external source, keeping the images external makes the application much simpler to design as well.
Loading external content keeps the initial download for web applications relatively small -
Because of this, you can load content on demand or preload the content. For example, if your application consists of an image gallery section, you may not want to force all users to download all the images if they aren't necessarily going to view them. Instead, you can load the content as it is requested.
Flash has long been able to load external SWF content and, since Flash Player 6, Flash has been able to load nonprogressive JPG content. Starting with Flash Player 8, you can load JPG content (progressive and nonprogressive), GIF content, and even PNG content. If you attempt to load unsupported image content, Flash will silently fail.
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