Introduction

This section of tutorials looks at some common network operations, starting with "preloading" things. When preloading a Shockwave movie, you usually want to do these things: (1) specify the URL of the thing to preload; (2) be told how the preload is progressing; and (3) be told when the preload is complete. So in Part 1 of this tutorial will be to create a generic "preloader" script which will preload a file from a specified URL. This preload might take a while, so we will create some sort of 'progress bar' to show the user how much more of their precious time will be required before the thing has finished downloading. In Part 2 of this tutorial will look at ways of creating animated progress bars.

In Part 3, we will create similar scripts for submitting and retrieving text from a server using POST and GET.

Part 4 looks at setting parameters for shockwave using the SW parameters in the Object (and Embed) HTML markup used to embed Shockwave.

In Part 5, we'll look at some fairly common activities, such as getting and posting data to a MySQL database.