The Essential Guide to Flex 3

By Charles E Brown

Flex 3 is the next generation of a technology that revolutionized web applications. It is the next evolutionary step of Flash, which has grown from a web animation medium to a powerful enterprise web design and development platform. With nearly 98% of all web browsers, and a growing number of mobile devices, running Flash Player, a knowledge of Flex is indispensible for any serious web developer.

This book will show you how to create powerful Rich Internet Applications using Flex 3. After learning how to install and becoming familiar with the basics of the Flex Builder 3 software, you will explore in depth how the Flash scripting language, ActionScript 3.0, interacts with Flex's powerful XML-like design language: MXML.

You'll learn how to construct your applications using layout and navigation containers, and how to move between various states using transitions. There is coverage of how best to plan your applications and use the Model-View-Controller pattern to keep various aspects of development separated and ease creation of potentially complicated projects.

Rich Internet Applications rely on data, and this book shows how to bring data from various sources into your Flex application and check its integrity, and how best to display and interact with it.

Going farther, applications built for the Flash platform can now exist and function beyond the traditional confines of the web browser. Adobe AIR allows you to take your applications to the desktop, and this book shows how to reapply your Flex skills to take advantage of this new environment.

The Essential Guide to Flex 3 takes you through all the powerful features of Flex using a series of stand-alone, practical exercises. The skills acquired throughout the book are then brought together in the form of a full-featured case study application showcasing essential techniques that can easily be applied to your own Flex applications.

In this book you'll

• Learn how to create powerful applications using Adobe Flex 3
• Use Flex Builder to design layouts using Flex MXML containers, and see how to combine MXML and ActionScript 3.0
• Work your way through a full-featured case study, building a complete Flex application
• Connect Flex to the ColdFusion application server, creating Flex applications powered by dynamic server-side code
• Take your web applications to the desktop using Adobe AIR

Summary of Contents

• Chapter 1: Flex Basics
• Chapter 2: Flex and Flex Builder 3
• Chapter 3: ActionScript
• Chapter 4: Containers
• Chapter 5: Events and Components
• Chapter 6: Flex and XML
• Chapter 7: Formatting and Cascading Style Sheets
• Chapter 8: The Repeater Component
• Chapter 9: Drag and Drop
• Chapter 10: Case Study: Part 1
• Chapter 11: Case Study: Part 2
• Chapter 12: Flex and Data
• Chapter 13: Printing
• Chapter 14: Charting
• Chapter 15: Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

This book is part of friends of ED's 'Essential Guide' series

The Essential Guide series takes a pragmatic approach to learning. We understand that you might not have the time or the inclination to read through a long book before you can get up and running, and we designed this series to give you the knowledge you want when you want it. The learning is always by example, with lots of code snippets that you can take with you and use in your own applications. The focus is on targeted learning for web professionals—providing the essential tools that the modern web developer needs. A book in this series won't focus as much on the basics as a Foundation book, but it will take you further, introducing some advanced topics that are essential for using a particular technology in the real world.