1. The Fundamentals
2. Data and Communications
3. Application Development

Each part will be roughly a third of the book. As no previous Flex knowledge is assumed, the first part covers the basics of Flex development. This includes the tools you’ll use, the user interface elements, an introduction to ActionScript, and a discussion of event handling. The second part of the book is especially important, I believe, as working with data and client-server communications are what give Rich Internet Applications their true power. Unlike the other Flex books that I’ve seen, I’ll be exclusively using PHP for my server-side code. This is in part because I’m a PHP guy at heart, in part because increased PHP support is a key addition to Flex 4, and in part because I want to present Flex development in a way that doesn’t require a huge amount of cash or server requirements. The last section of the book adds more advanced concepts, ties together what had been discussed to that point, and has more complete examples.

I’ll post more details in time. If you have any questions or comments, on my book or on Flex, please share them. Thanks!

I started by working my way through Adobe’s really nice Flex in a Week video training series. And when I say “working my way through”, I really mean that I watched most of the videos for Day 1, Flex Basics. That’s it. I will watch the rest, because they are very good, but that’s all I got through before I started roaming into my own programming. I’ve also been reading the book Getting Started with Flex 3. It’s a short, introductory book, that both touches upon some of the features and concepts of Flex, as well as demonstrates some pratical uses of the technology.

As you can see, I haven’t really put a whole lot of time and effort into learning Flex, but I’m close to wrapping up my first AIR application. That’s pretty impressive. A lot of the credit goes to Flex Builder, which is an Eclipse-based IDE. It’s not a cheap application but it seems to be well worth the money. (Flex, as of version 3, is open source, and you can build Flex applications without spending any money, but you can arguably build them faster by paying for the Flex Builder IDE.) Like any IDE, Flex Builder writes code for you when you drag and drop different widgets onto the page.

There are two initial ideas I’m playing with for using Flex. One is a Web-based contact system that should improve the interaction when people go to contact me. The hope is that the form will insure that I get the information I need when questions are asked and that the information is all accurate. More on this in another post. The second idea is an AIR application for managing some of my site’s content. Last summer I started writing one using HTML and JavaScript. It’s been my intention to finish that during my sabbatical, but since I wanted to learn Flex, it made for a good practice example. This is the application that I’ve almost finished, in just about four hours over a couple of days.

I’m still all for writing AIR applications in HTML and JavaScript (I’m a big fan of AIR, period), but Flex did make several things much easier. For example, my application has one area for managing site news and another for managing book errata. In the HTML version, I had to tap into the YUI JavaScript framework to create tabs. This took a little time and learning. In the Flex app, I just dragged in a TabNavigator control into the work area (see the image):

The application's two tabs.

The most important part of the application is the errata management. This is a multistep process. First I need to select the book involved, then I need to update the list of chapters for that book. I thought it’d also be a nice feature to show the current errata. For the HTML version of the application, I had already created a PHP script that sends the list of errata in XML format. I tied into this in my Flex version using an HTTPService object. Then a DataGrid object automatically turns the XML into a table. After editing one thing in the DataGrid’s configuration, this table immediately because sortable, which is a nice feature not easily added to the HTML version of the table I had previously made. Here’s what the errata management looks like:

As you can tell in the image, I haven’t done much to make the application look nice, but that’ll easily be tweaked later. You can tell from the single image, but when you select a new book from the top drop-down menu (a ComboBox object populated from an array), the drop-down menu of chapters and that DataGrid of current errata updates automatically. I’m pretty pleased and, again, it’s quite something to be able to put together in just a couple of hours.

I have a few more things to add to this, then I’ll finish actually learning Flex (because that’s the way I learn, apparently). I also need to read up on Flex and PHP, as I’m using the two technologies together.