AdvancED Flex Application Development: Building Rich Media X...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 550 pages
• Published by: friends of ED December 10, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1590598962
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1590598962
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.5 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 1.9 pounds

Product Description
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 new 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 Platform application development.

In this book you'll learn how to

• 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

Summary of Contents

• PART 1 PLANNING THE RMX
  • Chapter 1 Introduction to Flex 2 Applications
  • Chapter 2 Defining the Application: Introducing the RMX
  • Chapter 3 Planning the Application: Building the RMX
• PART 2 BUILDING THE RMX CORE FUNCTIONS
  • Chapter 4 Preparing to Get to Work
  • Chapter 5 Styling Flex
  • Chapter 6 Collecting and Working with Aggregated Content
  • Chapter 7 Secondary Navigation
  • Chapter 8 Forms and Validation
  • Chapter 9 User Communications
  • Chapter ten Working with Video
  • Chapter 11 Advertising and Flex
• PART 3 BUILDING OUT NEW FEATURES
  • Chapter 12 Building the Blog
  • Chapter 13 Building the Jobs Board
  • Chapter 14 Building the Event Calendar
  • Chapter 15 Ideas for the Future: Extending the RMX
• PART 4 SPECIAL TOPICS
  • Chapter 16 RSLs and Persistent Framework Caching
  • Chapter 17 Search Engine Optimization for Flex
  • Chapter 18 Building an Audio Visualizer in Flex
  • Appendix The Evolving Flex Scene

About The Author
R Blank is CTO of Almer/Blank, an Adobe Solution Partner based in Venice, California that specializes in video and application development for the Flash Platform, for clients including E! Entertainment Television, Microsoft, Apple, and IKEA. For over 12 years he has been an interactive designer, developer, consultant, teacher, and author, specializing in the planning, development and release of rich interfaces; R has specialized in Flash since 1999.

R holds four Flash Certifications, was one of the first 50 Macromedia Certified Flash Developers in the world, and is a contributing author for the Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Designer Certification Exam. R also founded and manages LAFlash.org, a community of over 1,300 Flash industry professionals, and home to three Macromedia Users Groups for Flash. R also serves on the Information Technology Faculty at the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering.

Previously, R co-founded and served as Director of Product & Design at Wildform, where he co-created Flix, the first video encoder for Flash (now owned by On2). R has an MBA in Entrepreneurship from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a BA in History from Columbia University.


Reader Reviews
I bought this book because the video review by the author refers to using flex with php and mysql. Unfortunately, when you do get to the chapter on php and mysql, the author includes a note telling the reader that delving too deeply into php and mysql is outside the scope of this book. It's not that there's not a php/mysql example, rather if your a php mysql programmer, the example is of little help in learning to integrate flex with php/mysql. For instance the author uses an earlier version of amfphp for the database integration, although he refers to the newer version. This is not to mention that there is very little information on the subject of amfphp. This certainly is not a book for the beginner getting into Flex and if your a php mysql programmer whose looking for a way to blend your current skills with flex, look somewhere else.