My First Flex Application!

November 10, 2006 · 9 Comments

Yes, I've finally started using Flex! Thanx to Tom Ortega of Silvafug and his employer eBay for offering free training on Flex. Last night was the first public training session and it was pretty well attended - it was also broadcast using Acrobat Connect (and recorded; I'll add the link when I see it posted). Tom covered the basic concepts and then took us through the layout model and several of the containers Flex provides. He showed how to tie components together with ActionScript and that there is a debugger for stepping through your code. He covered the data grid and view stack components as well. I followed along on my laptop (Flex Builder 2 for OS X rocks) and learned enough to be dangerous in this two hour session. Tom said remote objects will be covered in the next training session but I experimented with that myself and, by this morning's BART ride, has conquered that too (it took me a while to figure out that if you have a non-empty context root on your ColdFusion server, you need to specify the endpoint attribute on the RemoteObject tag). So now I have my first real Flex application running! It's a testing console for the web services / remoting services my team has been building. Nothing fancy but it does the job. A tab for each service being tested. Each tab offers a form on the left to enter parameters for the service to call and the results are displayed on the right. I think I'm going to enjoy using Flex!

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Tags: flex

9 responses so far ↓

1 Stacy Young // Nov 10, 2006 at 12:27 PM

'Tis a fun ride. :)
2 Simon Horwith // Nov 10, 2006 at 12:30 PM

So, I can't yell "Virgin" at you from across the room anymore? Just teasing - glad to see that you've also "seen the light"... simply put, Flex is awesome. I've said that for several years, and it's so much more true now (with Flex 2) than ever. Is your console something we can see publicly?
3 Kevin Hoyt // Nov 10, 2006 at 12:38 PM

Welcome to the fold!
4 Sean Corfield // Nov 10, 2006 at 1:04 PM

Thanx guys... Purely an internal testing app...
5 Gus // Nov 10, 2006 at 1:43 PM

Not only is Flex awesome, but coupled with ColdFusion on the back end it is amazingly easy to build significant applications.

I am in the middle of building a Flex/CFMX app to replace a desktop HR system for a client. The speed records are returned is amazing. It feels like a desktop app rather than client/server.

Gus
6 Rich Tretola // Nov 10, 2006 at 5:13 PM

Welcome to the future Sean :)
7 Jeff Knooren // Nov 11, 2006 at 5:16 AM

Initially, I was excited by Flex. The ColdFusion/Flex Application Wizard does produce an amazing amount of complicated code. Maybe, I've just bitten off more than I can chew. My ColdFusion is rusty, and I don't know ActionScript. My progress with Flex was at an absolute crawl once I tried to deviate from playing with the standard components.
8 Sean Corfield // Nov 12, 2006 at 12:30 AM

Jeff, ActionScript is just a different flavor of JavaScript - both are based on ECMAScript.
9 Birgit Pauli-Haack // Dec 23, 2006 at 2:14 PM

The link for the recorded sessions:

Session 1: Flex Builder Tour, Using Base Components, Extending Components, Custom Components, Forms in Flex vs HTML/CFML, and more.
November 9, 2006 - Recorded Link: http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p35665420/

I am sure the Silvafug will update the site as soon as they know where to find the recorded session.

Birgit

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