Hello all, first post here and it is this interesting set of posts that brought me to this forum.

I have a large amount of experience developing web applications and am interested in starting a project that will use flash.

To rephrase this question to a scope that perhaps someone can answer...

What technologies can be used together to allow for the creation of a multi-player online game? To simplify the word "game", please use online poker as an example (ignoring the details of poker including randomness of cards, and rules - using poker will also keep us away from advanced game variables such as 3 dimensional positioning, advanced graphics, etc.).

Assumptions:
1. User data and most game data will be stored in an online database.

I have divided this question into subquestions:

1. What technology is best to use to have flash talk to a database?
2. What keeps track of things such as time left until player is skipped, users talking to one another, and other per game time sensitive variables? (if these change, what technology is used to push this to every user?)
This aught to be a more controlled start to a rather vague question.