Rich Internet Applications is the new buzz-phrase for Web 2.0, and a key component of the substance behind Web 2.0 is Adobe Flash. Learn how to integrate Flash movies into your application and generate Flash movies dynamically using the Ming library.

They start with a brief look at Flash and how its embedded into a web page, including the needed HTML. From there, they jump right into Ming.

They create a sample Flash file - a "Hello World" - to get the ball rolling. They modify it a bit and create some moving text of varying colors. Next up is working with shapes and lines, and finally - importing and using images in your simple PHP-generated Flash animation.

Laszlo Zsidi is a PHP Web developer that has written an harder to break CAPTCHA solution. It consists in generating animated GIF images that exhibit the validation text.

Since the text never appears all at once in each of the animated frames, this solution certainly raises the bar in terms of difficulty for the robots to guess the validation text, making it very hard to defeat, if possible at all.

You can check out the class here, including a sample animated gif file and a download of everything you'll need to get started.

He has developed several pure PHP components that implement impressive 3D animated graphics, like a 3D objects rendering engine, emulate a waving flag or the reflex of an image near a lake. The generated frames are combined into a single animated GIF with another pure PHP component also written by László. All these components were nominated to the PHP Programming Innovation Award for the evident creativity, demonstrating that PHP can be used for non-trivial software applications.

Some of the libraries in the listing include:

• Animated GIF into images
• Image Flag Effect
• Text 3D
• FXLake effect
• Convex 3D