I loved Flex the first time I saw it’s framework open and the first tags appeared in my screen! It’s increadible how you can manage ActionScript classes with MXML (XML-like user interface language) and extend these classes to create RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) based on Flash that can be built on the fly usign the AJAX Bridge.
You can, using Flex, create applications that access REST and Web Services to retrieve XML information and present it in a Flash like way, with standard components or create your own. It’s simple to use, flexible to customize and powerfull to use.
Enough of my personal impression. I will show a simple Flex application and you take your own conclusions.
There we go! We are using here six MXML tags to create this example, there are: Application, HBox, Tree, VBox, TextArea and XMLList.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute">
<mx:HBox left="40" top="40">
<mx:Tree dataProvider="{TreeData}" labelField="@label" width="200"
height="500" change="output.text = event.currentTarget.selectedItem.@label;"/>
<mx:VBox>
<mx:TextArea id="output"/>
</mx:VBox>
</mx:HBox>
<mx:XMLList id="TreeData" xmlns="">
<item label="Item 1">
<item label="Item 1-1"/>
<item label="Item 1-2">
<item id="item121" label="Item 1-2-1"/>
</item>
</item>
<item label="Item 2"/>
</mx:XMLList>
</mx:Application>
Resulting in this:
As you can see, it’s simple to create a RIA in some minutes using this powerfull tool, that can be customized in many ways to suit our needs.
Thant’s all folks! Hope you enjoy!
