Dynamically Auto-Populating A Flash Menu Using AS3/PHP (No AMFPHP Required)

This was a personal project that I had been working on recently. I wanted to do a more flash centric theme redesign, but I still wanted to use Drupal for controlling my menus and automatically updating content categories. This of course required that I come up with a reliable way of populating a flash menu based on changes to Drupal's SQL database. After a little bit of trial and error I think I finally came up with a solution that works well enough to be considered stable. I posted about this on my blog, but I thought I would add a post here in case anyone else was looking for something similar.

Dynamically Auto-Populating Flash Menu Using AS3/PHP (No AMFPHP Required)

My main reason for avoiding AMFPHP is that there is not a recommended release of the required services module available for Drupal 6 users. Not that this solution is perfect, but since it does not tie into Drupal directly, this method easily sidesteps any possible stability concerns in regards to Drupal itself.

My primary concerns are with security, since if you know the name and location of the config file it would be possible for outside users to retrieve or write data to your database simply by modifying some php. The key here of course is to hide the config file, or to do some sort of obfuscated remote entry system, and to lock off access to the php using your crossdomain.xml but for the purposes of this demo I kept things simple. (The above can be said for almost open source php system though, if you can see how the system works, you can always find points of weakness that could be exploited.)