Automatic Flash Map Generation

For a large exhibition web site I used the ming library in a C++ program to automatically generate over 500 maps.

In the first year the data came from csv files, after that from an SQL database. The maps were interactive and had clickable regions that took users directly to the relevant part of the web site. Map generation was relatively quick, allowing them to be generated frequently during web site development and then, after launch, each time the database was updated.

The application also required generating a static image file from each map. The first year we used a commercial application called swf2video, which worked okay but was windows only and required manual intervention, which was too time-consuming. After that I made a simple utility using flirt (and open source swf display library) to convert the maps to png.

Comments: I found ming hard to use for anything except simple swfs; in particular it was very easy to leak memory or give it a bad pointer that would crash it. If developing such an application from scratch now I would more than likely use swfmill.