Postcards From My Life

Dear Reader,

If you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed that I recently published a series of articles over on phparch.com discussing the new Data Connection Wizard for PHP that Adobe has built into Flash Builder 4. While I am not a great fan of Wizards in general, I recognize that there is a segment of the developer population that does like them so I respect that and try not to run screaming from the room every time I see someone using one.
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Dear Reader,

This weekend’s Flex project was more successful that last weeks. At least the code has survived this far without me declaring it a bust and moving on to the next project.

This week’s project involves (among other things) calling an API that returns a graphic and then displaying it on-screen. Being the Flex neophyte I am, I assumed that this was a simple call to HTTPService. Unfortunately, as I found out, that won’t work. HTTPService is designed specifically to work with APIs that return specific types of data.
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Dear Reader,

I am a web developer. It’s been over 10 years since I’ve done serious desktop application development. So when I fire up Flex Builder to write my first AIR application, it takes a while for things to start coming back to me. One of the things that is only now starting to come back is Event Driven Programming.

This past week I decided to start working on a small project to scratch a personal itch. The project itself fizzled but I learned something none-the-less. I learned how to create custom events in Flex 3.

The project required selecting a file for processing. Flex 3 has a control for actually opening the dialog box and selecting the file but no control that shows the button and the selected file name.

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