| Regardless of which type of application they’re building, developers usually have to carry out a range of common tasks: communicating information to a user, displaying pop-up windows, showing repeating information in a tabular or grid layout, providing forms to update an external data source, and so on. Many times, when learning a new programming language I’ve wanted a book that provided me with a set of building blocks showing me how to achieve one of these tasks. So I wanted to write one about the Flex framework that covered these common developer tasks and then brought the concepts together in a series of case studies. Welcome to this book.
If you’ve picked up the book, you’re probably a designer or developer who has some experience with the Flex 2 or 3 framework. You’ve probably had some exposure to ActionScript 2.0 and are keen to learn more about ActionScript 3.0.
With this book, you can take your skills to the next level. No book can cover everything, but here you’ll learn some of the more useful tools for Flex application development. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to include external data within your Flex applications. I’ll focus particularly on XML documents and content from databases and show you how to add this information to your Flex interfaces.
The book is purposely simple so you can get the basic concepts right. Each chapter covers a small topic, demonstrating, with some basic examples, how you might achieve specific tasks using Flex. It’s not until the second part of the book that we put these concepts together to create four complete applications.
This book started as a book about Flex 2. During the writing process, Adobe announced the release of Flex 3, so I changed the focus halfway through. It was also interrupted by the birth of my son in June 2007, so it’s been a long road.
I hope you enjoy reading this book and that you find it useful for demonstrating some of the complexities of Flex 3 and ActionScript 3.0. I find Flex to be a very powerful application development tool and I hope to share my excitement about it with you! |
