A friend’s husband contacted me about an android app, so I made him a quick one. It basically just grabs an image from his website and displays it. Every minute or so, it does this again.
Pretty boring, right? But maybe someone wants to load an image from the web. I know I did. Just recently, in fact¹.

1. see above.

package;


import flash.display.Sprite;	
import flash.display.Bitmap;
// This is what we need to retrieve the image
import flash.display.Loader;	
// This is how we specify the location of the image
import flash.net.URLRequest;	

// Downloading an image can dispatch a lot of different event types!
import flash.events.Event;		
import flash.events.ProgressEvent;
import flash.events.SecurityErrorEvent;
import flash.events.HTTPStatusEvent;
import flash.events.IOErrorEvent;

// For timing
import flash.Lib; 


class Main extends Sprite {
	
	
	private var request:URLRequest;
	private var loader:Loader;
	private var status:Int; // This will store the last HTTP status
	
	private var lastTime:Float;
	private var loading:Bool;
	
	public function new () {
		super ();
		
		// Instantiate the guys!
		request = new URLRequest( 'http://vancam.ca/vancam.jpg' );
		loader = new Loader();
		
		// Prepare for loader.load()'s billion events
		loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener( Event.COMPLETE, onComplete );
		loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener( Event.OPEN, onOpen );
		loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener( ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, onProgress );
		loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener( SecurityErrorEvent.SECURITY_ERROR, onSecurity );
		loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener( HTTPStatusEvent.HTTP_STATUS, onHTTPStatus );
		loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener( IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, onIOError );
		loader.load( request );
		
		// Don't want to load more than one at a time that would be ridiculous
		loading = true;
		
		// Prepare for timing
		lastTime = Lib.getTimer();
		addEventListener( Event.ENTER_FRAME, onFrame );
		
	}
	
	
	private function onFrame( e:Event ) {
		var time = Lib.getTimer();
		var delta = time - lastTime;
		if ( delta > 1000 * 60 ) { // Should be about 1 minute, if my guesses were correct
			if ( !loading ) { // If it's already loading we shouldn't initiate a new load
				loader.load( request );
				lastTime = time;
			}
		}
	}
	
	
	 private function onComplete(event:Event):Void {
		if ( status == 200 ) {	// 200 is a successful HTTP status
			
			var b:Bitmap = event.target.content;	// This is where the bitmap lives
		
			// I cut out some scaling and positioning logic here
			// ...
			
			// Remove the old children (older versions of the bitmap).. You know, for memory reasons
			while( this.numChildren > 0 ) {
				var a:Bitmap = cast( image.removeChildAt( 0 ), Bitmap );
				a.bitmapData.dispose();				
			}
			
			// Add the new one
			image.addChild( b );
			
		} 
		
		// Loading process is now complete
		loading = false;
	}
	
	private function onOpen(event:Event):Void {
		// The download has begun!
		loading = true;
	}

	private function onProgress(event:ProgressEvent):Void {
		var p = event.bytesLoaded/event.bytesTotal;
		// Math.round(p*100) is the current percent of bytes retrieved
	}

	private function onSecurity(event:SecurityErrorEvent):Void {
		trace("securityErrorHandler: " + event);
		loading = false;
	}

	private function onHTTPStatus(event:HTTPStatusEvent):Void {
		// Hopefully this is 200
		status = event.status;
	}

	private function onIOError(event:IOErrorEvent):Void {
		trace("ioErrorHandler: " + event);
		loading = false;
	}

}

So that should work for android. If you’re compiling for flash, some security issues come up. But by changing your security settings (trusted sites, I believe) you should be able to get it to work. Once it’s uploaded, you may have to place a crossdomain.xml on the image’s server (I didn’t check).