August 4, 2007 

Do you have any questions on Flex? Any questions at all?

Continuing the effort to making Comcast Interactive Media a Flex center of excellence, next week the team here is going to be trained by Jeff Tapper, one of the biggest names in the Flex community. Most Flex developers may know him from his book, Adobe Flex 2, Training from the source. Since the team here has been working with Flex for a while, we are not going to have a structured learning class but rather a free 3 day long QA + coding sessions.

I do have a list of questions I want to ask him, but they arent that many. So if you guys have any questions, drop me a comment and I will try my best to bring them up, since a lot of the answers will be beneficial to all. At the end of each day I will put up the day’s conversations up online for the whole www :) .

And if you want to be part of the Flex developer team at Comcast Interactive Media, drop me an email at mathur.arpit [at] gmail dot com.

  • http://blog.wheelerstreet.com Paul Rangel

    I have a list of questions but I’ll start with the one that “gets my goat” the most these days. It’s with the preloader. We’ve done some custom preloaders using the Flash CS3 integration kit and it’s awesome. We modified Ted Patricks class for overriding the default preloader and added an additional phase to the loading process to load a configuration file for our applications while the app is doing it’s instantiation. All is well until we try to save this data to be used in the app!! There’s no way to save it in a variable that is still accessible once the app. has instantiated. Or is there?

    To sum it up.

    Is there a way to load an XML config file while the Flex framework is loading and have that available in the app?

    Our solution:

    Save it in a shared object ( write it to the disk) and call it up once the app has creation completeded : ) . This solution is fine but I figure there has to be another way since we use this design pattern in 90% of our projects and I would like to make the most of the inital load since the user is waiting anyway. Thanks for offering up the time for questions I can’t wait to see what you guys get to ask.

    Paul

  • http://www.arpitonline.com arpit

    Paul,
    I’ll make sure that I bring that up. I havent created a custom loader yet myself even though I have been meaning to for a while but wasnt aware that you couldnt store the loaded info anywhere in the application without going via the Shared Object. In the meanwhile, send me your list and I’ll try to get through em.

  • http://www.datanotion.com SmackDaddy

    Howdy. Two things I would like to see.

    #1: What is the best way to implement a global exception handler in my Flex apps. Every other language I use has one, and I *really* need to know when errors are happening, because my users are not telling me all the time.

    #2: I would like to see an example of the best, proper, yet simple way to build lazy trees. I’ve never seen a good, clean, easy to understand example in Flex.

    Hope this is what you were looking for.

  • http://www.medienstern.de/werbeagentur.php Werbeagentur

    Hi, I´ve got a question. I want to learn Flex. Must be learn Flash, too?? Or can anyone advise me an Flex – learn Book?? I want to learn Flex. It would be usefully for me in the future. Please reply.
    Thanks for sharing this article.

  • http://www.arpitonline.com arpit

    @Werbeagentur,

    Flex is aimed at people who arent familiar with Flash. A lot of metaphors in Flex are closer to HTML so its easy to get going and build apps as long as you dont need any custom UI controls. If you know javascript or have a background in any kind of object oriented language, Flex should be easy to understand, but Flex+Flash is a lethal combo.

  • http://www.medienstern.de/werbeagentur.html Werbeagentur

    thanks arpit for the information ;) I buy Flex and try to learn all the functions. Thank you again