October 2009 Archives

I am currently working on a project with Hannah Williams in Gravitational Wave Physics. What she wanted to do was to display maps of pulsars and their related information. Up to now, the  data has only existed in text format. Pretty boring. What I'm doing is using Flash to display a blank map and connecting to their database to retrieve data to dynamically plot the pulsar locations on the map. Once the pulsars are plotted, viewers can click on any pulsar and view information about that particular pulsar in a sliding panel  below the map. There are four maps and each has its own set of pulsars. To do this I have a PHP script that accesses the database and reads out all the data directly into flash. My actionscript in Flash will then parse the data and create associative arrays of the data for each map in the database. The site is currently password-protected, but here is a screenshot of what it looks like:

This was a very helpful project for me in that it allowed me to learn several things at once: How to retrieve data from a database via actionscript and PHP, how to parse that data, how to dynamically place movie clips at specific locations on the screen, and how to remove them properly. What will be cool about this is that they will be able to add new pulsars and data to the database and it will just automatically show up in the Flash interface.