Graphing With Flash (SWF) Page 2

#
# Table structure for table 'city'
#

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS city;
CREATE TABLE city (
   city_id int(14) NOT NULL auto_increment,
   city_name varchar(255) NOT NULL,
   city_timestamp timestamp(14),
   PRIMARY KEY (city_id)
);

#
# Dumping data for table 'city'
#

INSERT INTO city VALUES( '1', 'London', '20000917122625');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '2', 'London', '20000917122626');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '3', 'London', '20000917122626');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '4', 'London', '20000917122627');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '5', 'Paris', '20000917122631');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '6', 'Paris', '20000917122632');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '7', 'New York', '20000917122644');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '8', 'New York', '20000917122645');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '9', 'New York', '20000917122646');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '10', 'New York', '20000917122646');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '11', 'New York', '20000917122647');
INSERT INTO city VALUES( '12', 'Hong Kong', '20000917122654');

Setting up your system for SWF

I use RedHat Linux 6.2, Apache 1.3.12 and PHP 4.0.2, compiled as an Apache module.
If you are using PHP on Windows, some things will be different, you will need to get or build a Flash DLL,
but the code should work without modification.

PHP offers the ability to create Shockwave Flash files via Paul Haeberli’s libswf module. You
need to download libswf at http://reality.sgi.com/grafica/flash/. Once you have libswf all you need
to do is to configure PHP –with-swf[=DIR] where DIR is a location containing the directories include
and lib. The include directory has to contain the swf.h file and the lib directory has to contain
the libswf.a file. When the libswf distribution is unpacked, the two files will be in one directory.
Consequently you will have to move the files to the proper location. The resulting direcory
structure should look the following:

/usr/local/swf/
		/include/
			swf.h
		/lib/
			libswf.a
		/fonts
...

In order to make the SWF functions work properly, you will have to copy the /usr/local/swf/fonts/
directory so it is accessable to your web server (The best way to do this with Apache and mod_php, is
to use absolute paths and copy the directory to your Apache installation’s DocumentRoot). A small
C program is provided in the libswf distibution to convert Type 1 fonts so they can be use with Flash.
Because we will be dynamically creating and writing SWF files, the user the web server runs as will have
to have write permission wherever you store the files.