Flex 2 sample applications – what do you want to see?

Two good application for flex:

First:
An application that is used for building an estimate for a construction company. The estimate belong to a job and each job is broken down into rooms and each room has estimate items assigned to it. Those estimate items have item types (linear feet of wall, square feet of walls, square feet of ceiling/floor, number of hours, number of units), some of these are derived from the room measurements (linear feet, square feet), the others are entered at estimate creation time by the estimator (number of hours). The price comes from multiplying the number of units by the price per unit and adding the all up.

Second:
Another application of interest for me would be a multi-state mini application (in a real world situation, this mini app would actually be part of a larger application, maybe a ‘dashboard’), with main page (state) being a list with an embedded search page, the other states would be an add, view, edit states with cool transitions between states.

Both should use ColdFusion and the new ColdFusion to Flex Bridge for database interaction. If you actually end up doing one of these, feel free to contact me via email if this is not clear.

Happy coding,

Mark

Hi

The sample app that I like to see in Flex 2 is the Restaurant finder with Mysql database and the MAP finder that was more rich that the last app of the Restaurant finder

(Im summary I Like to see one sample that connect with MySql DataBase)

Thanks

One thing that we as a community need to jam on is major open source projects building real tools.

The IFBIN contributions some Flex developers have been providing is ok – nothing wrong with getting paid, but making people have to pay for examples when a technology is still in its infancy inhibits the rate of adoption of Flex. So if you are a believer in Flex, its in your best interest to attract as many people to Flex as possible so that your skills become even more valuable based on the demand for the technology.

This is now the sweet spot in time for Flex. There are a lot of competiing technologies brewing out there that have a very passionate development community (ajax related things, droplets, xamlon/sparkle, openLaszlo, XUL/Luxor, XUI, JSF, Thinlets, SwiXML, XSWT, Vexi, Sulu, Jazilla, Keystone, GNUStep Renaissance, etc…). Flex has a very defined edge right now, but it won’t last for long.

Sample applications are a GREAT start. We’re all busy busting our butts in our day to day lives (I should have been home 40 minutes ago ), and my hats off to anyone who burns some midnight oil to churn out some examples on how to do stuff purely for sake of assisting the community.

But there’s an opportunity to take that a bit further and make some real industrial strength stuff. Tools that help other developers justify the ROI to their bosses when pitching Flex as an overall technology their company needs to get into.

The kinds of applications that everyone needs are the ones that are worth pursuing. E.g:
- Survey Management System
- Project Management
- Nested Objectives/Planning/Status Reporting
- Knowledge Base
- Ticketing/WorkFlow/Defect Management/Bug Tracking
- Etc…

I’ll be the first to admit if I’m going to talk so bold, what am I going to do about it? It’s tough, no doubt about it. I keep hoping to work on http://www.cflex.net to be totally community driven. But I hope later this year to champion some open source Flex projects once Flex 2 is final (I’ve fallen a bit behind).

Sorry for the long rant. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help Andrew.

Thanks!

how about an internet based SVn/CVS client? would be a nice interface to opensource flex comunity projects ) And if you pull that off I will bow before you ;oP

What about a really good slideshow maker. Evetrybody need one.

I know that there are undreds out there, but most are either to complicated or to basic.

It would be nice to have something very simple and sexy as Microsoft Photo Story, but lightweight so that you can show your friends on the web.

Hi there

We are very willing to release out Ticketing/Issue/Bug Tracking system with Flex. This is now done with ColdFusion. But I have yet to see a real connection and working one between Flex and CF. So far I have had no success in understanding how this is done.

A small example how the connection between Flex and CF is done would be killer.

As an IFBIN author, I would like to state that I understand that many people won’t want to pay for examples. I’ve personally chosen to continue releasing examples on my blog, as well as on IFBIN. I think my example of connection to AOL Instant Messenger shows off many features of Flex 2 and AS3, and it’s free on my blog. Arguably, I’m doing work for IFBIN that I may not have done at all, so it’s a win-win from my point of view.

Hey Andrew,

How about the big daddy of all flex example apps.
Something that uses Enterprise Server, Media Server.
Something that has multi user interactivity, a huge flex orgy
Also should look good, different to the standard flex apps.

Maybe based on Melbourne’s undeground art scene, community based where people can create rich media profiles, some sort of wicked community search and communicate feature.

Anyway just an idea, if you want a hand send me an email

Well, thanks for all the responses!

It looks like some of you want to see some really large sample applications, something a lot larger than a Hello World application (maybe with a button thrown in) :-p

I totally agree with Tariq – An open source initiative would be a fantastic way to promote the Flex product line and product awareness, whilst also aiding to prove the ROI that using Flex can offer. On the other hand, as an Adobe employee I wouldn’t want to take away from the business of Adobe Consulting by developing full blown open source applications for Project Management, Workflow, Knowledge Bases, CRM’s and so on. But no doubt something like this will come in due time with the release of the Flex SDK (which is fantastic news for all Web 2.0 developers out there).

Rather than building a full enterprise application, maybe a set of widgets and/or custom components is best in line to aid the development of these larger applications. These widgets could be listed on something such as http://www.cflex.net, and the developers of the widgets could provide API’s for easier integration with existing Flex/Flash applications? Would this kind of objective suit the masses? I think it would make for a fantastic open source project.

Apart from the larger scale variety, I would still focus on smaller demonstrable sample applications such as the basic Flickr photo viewer application by Peter Ent in the Flex showcase. More of these are needed so if you have anything to offer please submit it to the showcase via email ria@adobe.com

Keep your suggestions coming in. It’s been great to get all this feedback so far!

Some of the things i will be posting during the middle of may will be. The extreme basics of flex.

IE.

Insert information into a database,
Update information
Deleting Information
Display information

Of course my tutorials will be strictly in a Flex 2/CF manner, if anyone else who works with any other server side tech would like to help me, it would be a great way to start building a nice stockpile of beginners/intermediate tutorials.

Hi Jeremy,

For an existing knowledge base of beginner, intermediate and advanced tips take a look at cflex.net. Tariq Ahmed is putting a lot of effort into Community Flex, so it may be worth letting him know when you post a Flex/CF sample/tutorial.

Cheers.

I will most definitely forward them to tariq. Something else that I think would help the community, would be a standard forum set where seasoned developers and not so seasoned developers can get together and get questions answered. I know Adobe has the flex forums, but the chances of getting questions answered there are slim to none. I am going to talk to a few other developers and see if anyone wants to work with me on getting a community forum setup just for this.

Check out the forums on Flex Authority http://www.flexauthority.com/ It may be worth trying to push the use of the forums there.

Otherwise you’ll find man answers to your answers on the flexcoders Yahoo! group. You’ll find that a number of Adobe employees watch this list. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders

I have been to flex authority, but thier site is impossibly slow. Which is another issue I see with the yahoo groups. The topics are not organized in a good manner. Search can take 2-3 mins to even return a result, in which your answer may not even be in. I personally still us the flex coder groups, but still find they when trying to solve issues by search first, you always runinto the problem of having to search for a very long time.

Do you use the mail-archive to search? http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com

Others find it more convenient to receive flexcoders messages in email format so they can search their email instead.

I would like to see (yeah i know the post is old-ish) chart components similar to google finance:

scrollable line chart (with smaller overview chart like GF has)

ability to attach other charts to bottom; Google Finance has a bar chart showing trade volume; i’d like to see a chart that I can databind to the larger chart and show whatever kind of stuff i want, it shouldn’t always schroll synchronously.

or, if you’re busy, just throw together a simple framework that could give someone else enough information to do the work themselves. that person might be very new to flex, but a veteran programmer, and i — i mean that person might need a small kickstart to see how things work in flex.

thanks.

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for the kick up the butt! I still havent written anything as I proposed to do in some later posts. Things are heating up here as we get closer to the launch of Flex 2, so we’ve all been very busy.

Keep an eye out though as I hope to start posting more regularly very soon.

Cheers.

With the release of Flex 2 now I have searched high and low for some Basic tutorials on the listing by Jeremy:

Some of the things i will be posting during the middle of may will be. The extreme basics of flex.

IE.

Insert information into a database,
Update information
Deleting Information
Display information

These would be of so much use I think for a mass of junior developers like myself, please if there are any links could you forward and display

Cheers Simon

i want to COnnect to MSQl database using Flex Need Help.

I want to connect with PHP and MySql using flex2. I want to know different functions using this. Please if there any, then help me.
thanks

Hi guys… am new to flex and was wondering where i could find the best tutorials for beginners… Or do I have to buy one of that tutorial cd’s….

my webpage is still under construction flash developer london

I would like to see a Flex 2 app with a connection to mysql database with large data sets.
Several different ways of doing it with speed comparisons would be great.

A simple front end that makes a plot chart of 1,000 data points, all loaded from the mysql back end based on some simple user selection.

A demonstration app showing how to do that with various back ends. PHP, turbogears, flash data services – what would be simple, what would be fast?

Thanks

I would like to see a Flex 2 app with a connection to Oracle database with large data sets.
Several different ways of doing it with speed comparisons would be great.

A simple front end that makes a plot chart of 1,000 data points, all loaded from the mysql back end based on some simple user selection.

A demonstration app showing how to do that with various back ends. PHP, turbogears, flash data services – what would be simple, what would be fast?

Thanks

Are we into making of something like a flex wiki ?

Hi,

I would just like to see an application that uses flex with ASP.NET and C# using Sql server 2005 as the backend.

Thanks.