Dan Wilson started a nice series of entries on Flex.

Todd Sharp open "2007 CFeMmy Awards"and my blog is nominated for "Best Newcomer (CF Blog that started in 2007)". WOW! I AM glad someone read it and find it useful.

One day a wanted to incorporate one nice flex photo album for my daughter's site, so i started googling for ready to use open source solutions. The first idea was to use the Flex Book. It's something REALLY REALLY great. BUT! I wanted to have the application so, that it to be configurable. Basically to have the swf and giving the configuration file and the xml with photos definitions, the swf to create the book based on all that. This wasn't too easy, but little by little i started to get the desired result.... till the moment i wanted to have the WIDTH and HEIGHT values set from the configuration file. For some reason it did not work. No errors. Just the book did not show up. After few hours of fighting with it and trying to get in contact with the creator of that excellent component without any success, i gave up (for now).
So, i had to look for some other nice component. And i found the DisplayShelfcomponent. It went MUCH more smoothly. I don't pretend to have it done the best way (especially when i had to move into an Array the photos data read from the XML into an ArrayCollection), but it worked well. And the result of the first version can be seen here.

And if anyone is interested in the actual code i came to, here it is:

Here are a couple of snippets i've used when working on my chat application.

1. Add sound to your Flex application:

[Embed(source="media/audibles/chimeup.mp3")] [Bindable] public var chimeup:Class; public var snd_chimeup:Sound = new chimeup() as Sound; public var sndChannel_chimeup:SoundChannel; public function playChimeup():void { sndChannel_chimeup = snd_chimeup.play(); }

2. Making some code be executed at given intervals:

public function ShortTimer():void { var minuteTimer:Timer = new Timer(300000, 0); minuteTimer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, onTick); minuteTimer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE, onTimerComplete); minuteTimer.start(); } public function onTick(evt:TimerEvent):void { } public function onTimerComplete(evt:TimerEvent):void { ShortTimer(); }
Things to be noted here:

300000- is the number of milliseconds between code executions

onTick- is the function that will be executed at the given interval

onTimerComplete- the function that will be executed when the time finishes. Because we call ShortTimer()there it will mean that the timer will be reactivated.

Now all you need is to add creationComplete="ShortTimer()"to your mx:Application

3. Load CSS at runtime

Ruben Swieringa have a very nice tool - CSSLoaderthat allow you do that.
But there is a "spoon of tar". There seem to be cases when the CSS from the external file will not be applied to your application parts. So far it didn't work for me in the following cases:

setting the CSS for DataGridColumnwhen the CSS for DataGridhas been set

I have an Accordionwith 2 VBox'es. In the second VBoxthere is a HBoxthat have inside a LinkButtonand a CheckBox. Well.. setting the CSS for LinkButtonand CheckBoxfrom the external file does not work.

4. Loading configuration data at runtime

Using something like
var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest('config.xml?' + Math.random()); var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader(); loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onResponse); loader.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, ioErrorListener); loader.load(request);
will allow you load your configuration and when done the onResponsefunction will be executed. And the onResponsemay look like this:
[Bindable] private var siteURL:String; private function onResponse(event:Event):void { var loader:URLLoader = event.target as URLLoader; var _xml:XML = new XML(loader.data); var _feeds:XMLList = _xml.item; for each (var item:XML in _feeds ) { siteURL = item.siteURL.toString(); } }

OK. That's a start. And hereyou can see and try the current version of the chat.

Lately, in some free time i am working on a chat application done in Flex+CF using LCDS. I am not yet sure if it will be made an open source project, commercial project, or commercial with fre version project, but anyway I think i will be posting some of the gotchas i had or will have working on this.
Mid-time i've set the current version so that interested persons to can try it, use it, think about it and maybe even share ideas on things that such an application should have in their opinion.

Anyway, HEREis the link. Feel free to comment.