Programming Flex 3

Chapter 22. Building a Flex Application

Throughout this book, you’ve learned about all the pieces comprising Flex. But you haven’t seen how these pieces come together to create a working application. An academic knowledge of Flex is essential to successfully building Flex applications, but that knowledge is of little value unless you also have a concrete understanding of how to use what you’ve learned in practice. In this chapter, we’ll look at how to build a Flex application using everything you learned in the first 21 chapters of the book. We’ll walk through building a sample application to illustrate important concepts, and to give you practical experience building a Flex application.

Introducing the Sample Application

In this chapter, we’ll take a look at a sample application that illustrates the key points we discuss in the chapter. The sample application is a simple photo viewer that uses the Flickr API from the popular photo-sharing service, Flickr (http://www.flickr.com), to allow users to search for photos via keywords and then view photo details. We call this application FlickrFlex.

Figure 22-1 shows the application’s home page, which displays a random photo and a search form.

The entire application runs in a web browser, and it supports the browser’s back and forward buttons as well as deep linking directly to a search result or to a specific photo’s details.

Throughout this chapter, we’ll take a look at key parts of the application. What we will not do is go line by line ...