Flex yer Domino
Posted on 7/09/2007 1:37:58 by Tim Tripcony
A few weeks ago I played with Adobe Flex for a couple hours. I soon became distracted by other things and never got around to posting about the results. But I remembered tonight that I hadn't, and figured I might as well.Flex, in case you haven't already seen it, is a framework for building Flash RIA's. You define the application's interface and behavior in an XML file, and it generates a SWF for you. Since it's intended to be for full-fledged applications, not "movies", it's quite data-centric. And it happens to be very easy to use. The official IDE is based on Eclipse, and costs $499... can't imagine being able to justify that expense any time soon. But the good news is they have a free SDK. So you can just write the XML in your favorite text editor, run the command line script that comes with the SDK, and you're done.
In very short order, I was able to write a basic but fully functioning contact manager. This example stores its data in a Domino database. Domino's ReadViewEntries URL command returns a format that doesn't play particularly nice with Flex, so the database contains a page with an embedded view allowing a much more friendly XML format. You can download the example database and source XML here.