Display html data from database as flash?

An alternative to having Flash contact the a php page to get the text is to have the server generate the flash dynamically (providing it is not too complex) using, for example, the http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.ming.php or http://php.net/manual/en/book.swf.php Libraries.

You also have the option to use some of Flash's more advanced built-in remoting tools. If you are running PHP on your back-end, for instance, you could set up AMFPHP or ZendAMF. What this does is open a binary socket connection between the server and your client, and if you set it up right then you can alias remote classes to local classes and vice versa. So for instance you could define a "UserModel" class in Flash and a UserModel class in PHP, and then tell Flash to treat them as aliases of each other. What this basically lets you do is make remote server calls as though they were local method calls. Every major Flash project I've been on has used this approach. It's much faster than XML, you don't need to worry about parsing XML or JSON, and you can make remote method calls nicely. This works best if coupled with some sort of MVCS framework like RobotLegs, because then you can abstract away the server calls entirely - but that may be more complex than what you need, depending on what you're doing. But, the long and short of it is that Flash can't talk to a database directly. ACTUALLY, one more thing comes to mind - Omar Gonzalez has been working on something called MongoAS3, which allows flash to connect directly to a MongoDB database instance. It would require that your database be a NOSQL MongoDB rather than a standard MySQL but it might be good for your needs: http://www.mongoas3.com/