Getting Started with Flex 3

Chapter 2. Flex in Action

Flash has always been a great tool for adding interactivity to a website. But with the advent of Flex a whole new group of engineers, designers, and enthusiasts have been able to build a wide variety of Flash applications. This chapter will discuss a cross section of applications to give you some ideas for what you can do with Flex. As you are looking through these examples, bear two things in mind:

• Although these examples often look dauntingly complex to implement, the Flex framework makes much of this work very easy.

• All of these applications work without any changes on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, both in the browser and, often, on the desktop using Adobe’s AIR technology.

I found most of the examples in this chapter in the Flex Showcase portion of the http://flex.org website (http://flex.org/). The Showcase has an RSS feed that is worth subscribing to so that you can get a sense of what other people are producing using Flex.

E-Commerce

When your products are beautiful you want a beautiful way to present them to your customers. With that in mind, check out the Voelkl (http://www.voelkl-snowboards.com) snowboard selector in Figure 2-1. At the top of the page you can hover your mouse pointer over each snowboard design to find out more about it, as well as filter the selection of boards to just those for men, women, or rookies/kids.

Figure 2-1. Choose your weapon! ...