database choice for cd-rom and flash based app

Hi all,

I was wondering if someone could give me some advice. I'm about to design a flash based app that needs to work on the pc and mac. It will be exist on cd-rom and will be installed on the users pc or mac. I would like to store user entered information locally, and initially I was thinking about using a database. Or and xml based file. Database installation and licensing issues for the users might be a pain.

Does anyone have any advice as to choice of storage, and does anyone have any ideas on a good cross-platform database? I understand mysql is cross-platform. I don't know what the installation issues are.

I've reviewed techniques for extracting information from databases using flash. They all seem to be extracting the information from a remote webserver though.

What options are there to extract data from a LOCAL (on a users machine)database using flash?

Thanks much!

Carlos

You'd probably do best to go with a non-database solution or else you'll wind up with all sorts of support issues regarding installation, etc. Most users aren't going to be able to install and configure mysql (or another db), so I figure you should provide a full solution. XML sounds promising, though scalability becomes an issue when using flat formats like that. I suppose you could do something like build one xml file as a sort of index of other data files and use it to look up and then display info from those other XML files based on user input.

Yeah - I agree with dhouston on this one. Since it doesn't sound like there will be a lot of data needing storage, XML, or even a good ol' text file could do the trick.

What about SQLite... If I'm not mistaken, it's a file-based database that provides much of the functionality an RDBMS would... Although not to the fullest extent.

Still worth looking into...

Hi,

I'm sorry I'm responding right now. I never saw your email response in my email box until now! Thanks a lot for your input!

Its too bad there doesn't seem to be a nice integrated db solution with flash!

Hi there,

I'm sorry for the very late response. I didn't realize anyone had even responded! Does anyone know how to WRITE files xml/text out using flash? Is it actually possible?

I really need to save what would probably be a comparatively small amount of calender event information for each user. Over time it could grow, but I think local storage would be sufficient performance-wise. Later on I could switch to a server only solution.

Thanks!

so sorry for the late response. do you know if flash supports sqllite?

Thanks a million!

Carlos

Thanks for your reponse! sorry for the late response to you on this. To my recent knowlegde, flash does not have a native db format which stinks

I just googled "flash output XML" and got heaps of hits...
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx..._xmlobject.html
http://www.informit.com/isapi/produ...ntent/index.asp
http://www.tupps.com/flash/faq/xml.html