AdvancED Flex Application Development: Building Rich Media X (Advanced)

Many Flex books cover the basics—this book does something different, and goes far further. The authors, leading Flash platform developers at Almer/Blank, working with Adobe User Group communities, are the creators of the Rich Media Exchange (RMX), a social media network for Adobe developers. In covering just how the RMX was built, this book contains all the knowledge you need to build similar large-scale rich Internet applications with Adobe Flex. From the inception of the idea through to deployment, the authors show the techniques needed to plan and build advanced applications. You'll learn how to use forms, styles, validators, video, sound analysis, and framework caching, ensuring you make the most of the features introduced in Flex 3. Powerful applications require solid back ends. This book shows how to hook up a Flex application to PHP back-end systems such as Drupal and OpenAds. You'll learn how various parts of the RMX were built, including the blogs, event calendar, jobs board, and advertising system—elements that come together to really showcase the power of Flex. The RMX is built by Adobe developers for Adobe developers—a rewarding community relationship that guarantees results. The same spirit is carried into this book, with the authors wanting and helping to take you to the next level of Flash application development. What you’ll learn Effectively plan, wireframe, specify, develop, and release large-scale Flex applications, and discover what other development tools you'll want to start using immediately Make your Flex applications look less like Flex with advanced styling and skinning techniques Harness advanced Flex form features, including coding validators and building your custom form components Implement a robust advertising system for a Flex application using OpenAds Build powerful, custom multimedia players in Flex, including video players with the native VideoDisplay class and from scratch, and music players with advanced sound visualization Who this book is for Office and SharePoint 2007 User’s Guide: Integrating SharePoint with Excel, Outlook, Access and Word is a perfect reference for everyone who works at a company or organization that is using or planning to use either Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and who wants to make a difference by developing content, collaboration, and benefiting from the synergism working with several Microsoft products can provide.

Many Flex books cover the basics—this book does something different, and goes far further. The authors, leading Flash platform developers at Almer/Blank, working with Adobe User Group communities, are the creators of the Rich Media Exchange (RMX), a social media network for Adobe developers. In covering just how the RMX was built, this book contains all the knowledge you need to build similar large-scale rich Internet applications with Adobe Flex.

From the inception of the idea through to deployment, the authors show the techniques needed to plan and build advanced applications. You'll learn how to use forms, styles, validators, video, sound analysis, and framework caching, ensuring you make the most of the features introduced in Flex 3.

Powerful applications require solid back ends. This book shows how to hook up a Flex application to PHP back-end systems such as Drupal and OpenAds. You'll learn how various parts of the RMX were built, including the blogs, event calendar, jobs board, and advertising system—elements that come together to really showcase the power of Flex.

The RMX is built by Adobe developers for Adobe developers—a rewarding community relationship that guarantees results. The same spirit is carried into this book, with the authors wanting and helping to take you to the next level of Flash application development.

This book does a very good job of describing the decision making processes that go into using a particular piece of technology with Flex and how they apply this to their application which is actually titled "Rich Media X" (a blog/forum/user group app). If you want to see how or if you can integrate Drupal and Flex, this is probably a pretty good book. If you are looking for a book on a particular Flex framework like Cairngorm or what have you, it is not. What I think people are finding deceptive about this book is the "Flex Application Development", the AdvancED label, and the idea that you will be able to layout a Flex application from start to finish (and you will, just most likely not the application you had in mind). This book I see as being a great book to understand what is possible with Flex. I do not see this as a great book to learn Flex coding practices, coding frameworks, and anything else one might assume would be present in something titled Flex Application Development. If you go into this looking for meat and potatoes and coming away from this book full of Flex YOU WILL be disappointed. 5 stars for what it covers well, but take 1 star away for hungering for more. This book provides a practical guide to planning and building a professional Flex 2 application from start to finish. Written by a team of expert developers, the book details, step-by-step, how the authors built the popular Rich Media X (RMX) application for Adobe user groups, step by step. Coverage provides all the information needed to implement several killer web 2.0 features in Flex, including a blog, wiki, events calendar, and more. It is packed with essential practical techniques in use at a professional production environment, which you can learn from and use in your own Flex applications. This book is for any Flex developer who has mastered the basics, but wants to take their skills to the top level. It is packed with essential practical techniques in use in a professional production environment which you can learn from and use in your own Flex 2 or Flex 3 applications