» Are you looking for FLV Player?

« Google Deskbar
SEPY ActionScript editor »

Macromedia FLEX announced

17 November 2003 | filed under flex | no comments

I just participated in a Breeze Live presentation by Macromedia product evangelist “Christophe Coenraets:http://coenraets.org/. Topic of conversation was a hot new Macromedia product: FLEX. Formerly known as Royale, FLEX will make a RIA developers life a whole lot easier by introducing an XML based language to generate full-blown Flash RIA’s.

FLEX Basically allows you to specify the elements you wish to place in your RIA (using MXML, an XML based markup language) and then have the server generate the appropriate swf file for you. Connections to webservices and http post/get are no problem and are standard functionality offered by FLEX.

The FLEX Developers Center just opened and there’s a host of interesting reads available:

Besides reading all about it, you can also sign up for the FLEX Beta.

So, what does typical FLEX document look like? Well, the following piece of MXML (graciously taken from Christphes article) creates a simple RIA that allows the user to enter a stock quote and display the result:

PLAIN TEXT
HTML:
  1. <xml version=“1.0″ encoding=“iso-8859-1″?>
  2. <mx:Application xmlns:mx=“http://www.macromedia.com/2003/mxml”>
  3.  
  4.     <mx:WebService id=“wsStock” wsdl=“http://services.xmethods.net/soap/urn:xmethods-delayed-quotes.wsdl”>
  5.  
  6.         <mx:operation name=“getQuote”>
  7.             <mx:request>
  8.                 <symbol>{symbol.text}</symbol>
  9.             </mx:request>
  10.         </mx:operation>
  11.     </mx:WebService>
  12.  
  13.     <mx:Label text=“Enter a symbol:”/>
  14.     <mx:HBox>
  15.         <mx:TextInput id=“symbol”/>
  16.         <mx:Button label=“Get Quote” click=‘wsStock.getQuote.send()’/>
  17.     </mx:HBox>
  18.  
  19.     <mx:Label id=“quote” fontWeight=“bold”>{wsStock.getQuote.result}</mx:Label>
  20.  
  21. </mx:Application>

This would result in the following Flash-app:

Simple FLEX application

Okay, so it’s not a fast-moving, realtime video streaming killer-app. But it was created with about 10 lines of code and runs on virtually all browsers on all platforms. And talking about media and the kinky stuff, that too is possible with FLEX. You can import any jpg, swf, flv or custom component (as long as it is in swc format) you like to spice up your RIA. There are also a lot of possibilities regarding scripted animation of RIA elements.

It’s funny, by the way, I nearly finished my own (albeit much simpler) xml-to-flash form builder when I was invited by Macromedia to join in on the presentation by Christophe. Looks like my attempt to create a generic approach to RIA building has been in vain, as the huge amount of possibilities offered by FLEX really puts my efforts to shame… ;-)

 

 Bookmark on del.icio.us - posted at 17 November 2003 - filed under flex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply