Flex 3 Component Solutions:
Build Amazing Interfaces with Flex Components

By Jack Herrington

Flex has revolutionized the development of Rich Internet Applications, giving developers the framework necessary to easily create ever more powerful applications. Components form an essential part of this framework, and once you understand how to fully use them, your productivity and creativity will be taken to a whole new level. Flex 3 Component Solutions will show just what you can achieve with components and exactly how to achieve it.

You'll see just how simple it is to use components to create amazing interfaces for your applications be they media players, data visualizations, 3D graphics—the list is long. This book contains all you need to know to get the Finally, there'll be times when you'll want to or have no alternative but to create your own components. This book will show you how to do this for your own ends, or so you can contribute to the Flex component community by distributing them.

Flex 3 Component Solutions is a tour de force of components, and all of these components are demonstrated using real-world Flex code that you can use as starting points for your own applications. Take what you learn for this book, and then go out and create your own amazing interfaces quickly and easily: reuse, repurpose, redesign, and do it all faster and with greater quality control than you ever thought possible.

In this book you'll

• Discover amazing components that you can use in your applications right away
• Learn about how to build your own components
• Find the code needed to create compelling data visualizations using Flex
• Get lots of useful example ActionScript and MXML that you can use as templates for your own work
• Learn how to reskin your applications quickly

Summary of Contents

1. A Quick Introduction to Flex
2. Making States Rock
3. Getting Everything Set Up
4. Upgrading Your Containers
5. Handy New Control Types
6. Fun with Images
7. Audio and Video Components
8. 2D Graphing Components: Introducing Charting
9. 3D Graphing Components
10. Visualizing Time and Space
11. Interactive Mapping Controls
12. Introducing Hierarchal Data and Components
13. Network Graph Components
14. Cool Premade Skins
15. Building Your Own Components
16. Hacking into Data: A Flex Skunkworks

This book is part of friends of ED's 'Solutions' series

The Solutions series continues the pragmatic approach of the Essential Guide, but offers more in-depth answers to common technology problems. Once you're up and running with a technology, a Solutions book is the one you want at hand when you run into a stumbling block. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of the technology and gives the answer to all of the common problems related with it. With every answer, you are provided with a full explanation of the issue, giving you the whys, the wheres, and the workarounds, and an example application or code snippet that you can use to solve the problem in your own application.