Content sliders are an extremely popular feature in modern website design, particularly for online retailers. These sliders are often implemented with JavaScript, but there are many cases when an Adobe Flash-based content slider may offer more flexibility or a more polished finished project.
As an example, check out the Flash-powered content slider at DaHuer. This content slider is, in fact, the impetus for this tutorial and three more that follow, since one of our Ecommerce Developer readers asked for a tutorial that could recreate this sort of functionality.
So for the next four weeks, I'm going to tackle building a content slider. I could call it an image slider, but that might be selling it short because this baby is capable of a lot more than just images. It will be able to load SWF files, movies, and it can even generate dynamic text. We're not going to take it that far in this short series, but I'd love to see if any of you have made improvements.
In the first part of this tutorial, I'll set up the "model." That is, I'll write the class that will load the XML, parse the data, and distribute to the other classes in the application.
