[2 Sentences or Less]

XML, MXML, graphics and an idea for a quick presentation. I made my first Flex experiment a couple weeks ago, as my wife needed a quick presentation - on a deadline, of course.

So, I’m one of those sad sorts that lives for stress and pressure - a procrastinator to the core! Why develop something now, if you can wait until 10 minutes before it’s due? Much to my wife’s agony, I tend to frantically run around at the last minute wreaking havoc, then claiming victory and triumphantly pump my fists in the air for victory!

My wife is a graphic designer, that needed a quick mechanism to show a client some mock-ups online. So, I convinced her to let me do some RAD development with Flex. (If I haven’t mentioned it before, my better half is incredible patient with my hair-brained schemes and experiments.)

Objectives:

• RAD experiment
• Quick Presentation
• Easy navigation
• Clear organization of different mock-ups
• Scalable presentation and graphics

Resources:

• Flex Builder for Mac – This was an incredibly valuable tool for rapid development. Although I could have created the source with any text editor. It definitely made it easier for a newbie to create a fairly sophisticated user interface. (I used the Beta software, but this is now a public release for Macintosh.)
• Flex Quick Starts on the Flex Developer Center — were invaluable in my hunt and peck for example code.

Results:

• It’s not pretty, nor sophisticated, but it works! Take a look at the final product and the commented source code.
• Here are some interesting features that Flex included “automatically.” (As a Flash developer, this would have taken some forethought and coding to accomplish.)
• It has an load screen to manage any lag in loading the application.
• It is flexible and resizes to browser size.
• It will scale the images if the image panel is resized.
• It’s really ugly code, I admit it. But, I’m a newbie, a hack - and ultimately an tinkerer. There are definitely better ways to do this exercise, and maybe you’ll see them in the next version.

Next Steps:
Let’s add some dynamic data, maybe even allowing the XML of the images to update when new files are added to the images directory using PHP/Flash Remoting. This would allow any artist to update the portfolio, without the intervention of a developer.