great resource for flex information

a friend, andy trice, sent me this link today

http://kanuwadhwa.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/flex-links/

quite possibly one of the best compilation of flex links and useful information.
the entire blog appears to have some great information, and beginning flex information.

in fact, im going to add this blog to my blogroll on the right.

My First Package and the DisplayList

so, following along the lynda.com tutorials, i happened upon the one about the new feature in ActionScript3, and that is the "displayList". New to ActionScript, the displayList is basically the manager for all things that APPEAR on the stage. In order to show something on the stage you must add it to the stage, and conversely in order to NOT display some object on the stage, you can use removeChild().

its nothing too crazy, and really not that hard, but it was cool to see my first little creation come to life! now, this may appear as nothing but a circle with a line through it, but for my company, Navtrak, Inc. the icon you see bears a striking resemblance to our vehicle icon in our software.

anyway, the code for this exercise is below:

package {
import flash.display.Shape;
import flash.display.Sprite;

public class DisplayList extends Sprite {

public function DisplayList() {
var circle:Shape = new Shape();
circle.graphics.lineStyle(5,0x000000,1);
circle.graphics.beginFill(0xcc0000,.75);
circle.graphics.drawCircle(20,20,15);
addChild(circle);
circle.x = 30;
circle.y = 10
var line:Shape = new Shape();
line.graphics.lineStyle(2, 0, 100);
line.graphics.lineTo(25, 25);
addChild(line);
line.x = 30;
line.y = 10;
}
}
}

The example is here.

So far...

well, so far in my lessons i have learned about:

1. classes
2. packages
3. methods
4. properties
5. constructors
6. variables (duhhh)
7. expressions (duhhh)
8. conditional things
9. looping (duhhh)

and now its time to dive into classes a bit deeper, and today in the videos im actually going to be making my first class, and hopefully displaying something on the stage!

week 2 begins

ok, so a little turkey break took my time last couple days, but its week 2, and its time for some flex. i hope today to connect my first coldfusion webservice to a flex data grid. :) coming soon.

the curriculum

im going to get into my curriculum a bit so that i can remind myself what i wanted to do, from the beginning, and see how that changes over time.

week 1
a. read Programming Flex by Chafic Kazoun and Joey Lott
b. take the first set of lessons on actionscript from lynda.com

week 2
a. continue reading and re-reading the book above
b. wrap up on actionscript videos from lynda.com (easily the hardest part for me to pickup, being that i was more of a designer forever, and not a programmer in the oop sense of programming. im more of a coldfusion developer who can design as well)

week 3
a. Flex 2: Developing Rich Client Applications class at figleaf this is a two day class
that delves into the basics of flex development
b. build out my first little application. i want to make a simple CRUD system that i will eventually take into my day job (www.navtrak.net) and implement that as part of an effort to upgrade some backend systems.

week 4
a. continue reading and going over course material and working lots and lots of actionscript classes to become components for that backend app.

week 5
a. christmas :) forget geek stuff for a week

week 6
a. more work on backend components and loads of interface work. mxml i think will be the easy part for me, i think the bane of my flex existence will be actionscript.

week 7
a. another two day class @ figleaf, this time Flex 2: Dashboard Applications
b. back to back! thats right, another class at figleaf the same week: Flex 2: Programming the Visual Experience

this is good for now... this will keep me plenty busy for some time.

i hope to have examples of what im doing up here shortly. although most of the code ive done so far is too tiny to really get into it :)

Flex 2 Useful links

This blog is going to be the chronicle of my trip through learning how to make rich internet applications with yet another tool, Flex. I have been a web developer for about 13 years now and up until this point, everything was "ColdFusion + Javascript + CSS + Photoshop" to make it all look good and act like it should. Well, it's now time to move on and embellish my bag of tricks. And with that, this trip through learning Flex and its two languages, MXML and ActionScript begins!

I wanted to make sure this first post had some of the most useful links that I could get my hands on and to do that I tapped into a good friend and Flex Guru God Warlord, Andy Trice. Andy works for Cynergy and truly has opened my eyes to what is possible, and that it's even possible for me to start doing some of these cool things!

Anyway, here is the first of which I believe there will be MANY links to his site,

Useful links for getting started with Flex 2