Automatically generate web animation content?

knightofthesun · June 20th, 2009, 07:24 PM

What is the best way to automatically generate web content that displays images in a sequence? That is, given the images I want to generate the Javascript, Flash, or other video-like content for displaying the images like an animation.

Details:

My site has a set of short animations (currently 15 images each), along with some data and pdfs for each animation. A non-programmer will be hired to update the site with a new animation a few times a year. I have code for him to generate the images and other content. Currently, the site is in simple Javascript with image preloading that doesn't really work - the animations are choppy and unprofessional. My boss wants me to avoid Javascript and convert to Flash.

The hard part is that I need to provide code to automatically generate the website content (animations, etc) from the images and update the site. That is, the hired "updater" will run the code and then upload the new content. Right now, it is simple: each animation and data is an html file with centralised javascript, so updating means making a new page with references to the new images. Converting to flash is hard: I am working on a solution using libming and mingw/msys but it is a rather slow process that is requiring me to learn libming, flash, and actionscript all at once.

Is there a better way? I can convert to avi or other video - what's the best way to display it in a webpage? The solution should be easy to use to update the site, even if it means more coding on my part, and needs to work in Windows.

Dubbs · June 22nd, 2009, 10:51 AM

Either way you are going to have to learn Flash. I don't know how it is done, but there are Flash applications where you can put images into a folder and name them something like image01.jpg, image02.jpg, etc. Flash will then pull the images from the folder and place them correctly in the script. You can include the animations also if you wanted, in order to do the same thing.

alexgeek · June 22nd, 2009, 04:25 PM

Best way probably would be to have a PHP script (or ASP or some other language you are familiar with) generate XML such as:

Code:

<units>
<unit>
 <image>http://www.x.com/x.x</image>
 <data>
   <link>x.pdf</link>
   <link>x.doc</link>
 </data>
 </unit>
[...]
</unit>

This could then be dynamically loaded with AS, see http://www.kirupa.com/web/xml/index.htm

knightofthesun · June 23rd, 2009, 09:55 AM

thanks alex. my boss also doesn't want me to use php, but really i don't understand why it's necessary anyways. i can use any language i want to generate the xml, offline, and then just upload the xml file.

this sounds like exactly the solution i'm looking for.