I’ve been discovering the Flex development environment (Flash Builder) and the scripting language the last couple of weeks. I’ve been doing the very good on-line course which really gives you insight into the program and the object oriented approach that is used. It’s nice to test my knowledge of OOP and see how Flex compares to Java. In the course they use the MVC pattern to set up projects. The whole environment is set up so that it is easy to separate data from interface and functionality. Design can be styled in separate stylesheets. In design mode you can quickly create an application by dragging and dropping components.

After having worked with Flash for over 10 years this is such an improvement. Much credit of course goes to Eclipse, the base on which the Builder is build. I also love the Network Monitor. It lets you monitor all incoming and outgoing data in three views two of which being tree view (XML nodes) and raw (plain text). Binding is also a very important, new concept for me. It is used to bind data to UI components.

Flex can only take XML as input. Flash is a lot more flexible in that respect. So I have to format all the database data to XML which isn’t all that difficult once you get the hang of it. Below is my first Flex project using the data from the Collecting Silence database to determine the relationship between stress and silence. I’ve used a standard chart component to make a first visualisation and trying out the concepts.