Get 'Em While You Can
Building with Flash and MySQLFlashy Forms
To answer my question of a few entries back, yes. Yes, it is possible.
I hope the examples they use don't give anyone bad ideas. A purely text-based medium should, in my opinion, remain on a web page; Flash is best suited for places where a graphical interface makes sense, and if all you're doing is displaying loads of text, why not leave it on a web page where it can be resized for easier viewing? On the other hand, even a small Flash applet - or a series of them, as Launch uses - can send info to a database without distracting the user by reloading the entire page when all that changed was one small option. They may use a different scripting language or database for their rating system, but the basic idea is there, and it works seamlessly.
So, how can this be applied to an ongoing web-based game? A semi-real-time game might not be the most economical use of it - you'd need a Flash applet that regularly "pings" the database to see whose turn it is - but in a game with more of a delay between turns, perhaps similar to the old play-by-mail games, it might be easier to represent an actual board and pieces. It would also be easier to execute multi-part instructions without reloading the page in between steps, to display new data based on the prior instruction. (#)