With the advent of Flash 5 and MX the ability to create truly robust web applications finally became a reality. The stateless nature of the Web didn’t lend itself to creating rich user experiences like those found in desktop applications, but Flash came along and provided the mechanism to display text, graphics, and video and to maintain information on the client, dynamically requesting information from a database behind the scenes via a server-side programming language such as ASP.NET, JSP, PHP, or ColdFusion. The player got faster in many ways as it matured, while keeping the critical download size as small as possible. Macromedia started to make drastic improvements to the player to increase its speed and to open opportunities for developers to create inspirational sites (see Figure 1-3 for an example). The XML object was converted to a native data type in Flash Player 6, which meant the new player blazed through data received from a web service, file store, or server-side script.
