Posted By : Dan Wilson     February 21, 2008 7:02 PM

Thanks to Adobe and Ben Forta, I am the proud owner of a fancy Flip video camera. I've been tasked with recording 10 segments from the community answering the questions:

• Why Flex?
• Why ColdFusion?
• Why AIR?
• Why Flash?

Since I'll be at 360|Flex next week, finding 10 people to share will be easy. Come on over and let's hear your answers to these questions. Support your favorite platform!

360|Flex, be there or be square!

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     January 30, 2008 8:35 AM

On Feb. 5th, 2008 I'll be giving a Hands On Flex Training session to members of the Triangle User Experience (Flex User Group). This will be the first time I've had a run through of the Surfing Stats course I'll be presenting at 360|Flex Atlanta.

The training will last about 2.5 hours. We've capped the audience at 40, a number which is about what I expect at the 360|Flex Atlanta conference. Of course I'll have to trim a little off the course to account for a shorter time period. The attendees will learn a lot and get to build a working Flex application before they leave for the night. I'll also include the full application so the more enterprising ones can dissect it at their leisure.

There might still be space available. If you would like to attend, fill out the registration form on the Triangle User Experience website. If there is enough demand, we'll probably hold another one once the smoke from the 360|Flex conference clears.

Thanks goes to Adrian Pomilio for managing and coordinating the Triangles First Flex User group.

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     January 28, 2008 8:33 AM

I've interviewed John Wilker, who along with Tom Ortega, founded 360Conferences. John is an interesting guy who came up through the ranks as a ColdFusion programmer and later moved over to also developing Flex applications. Not mentioned in the interview, John has taken a co-host spot alongside Jeffry Houser on the Flex Show podcast. Be sure and tune in regularly.

360|Flex Atlanta is February 25-27, 2008. I went to the first ever 360|Flex conference in San Jose. It was a really Good Conference

Not academic nor dry, 360|Flex is alive, unpretentious and exciting! I learned more in some 1 hour sessions than I did in a week of pouring over Flex documentation. The food was always good. The conference was packed with lots of interesting people. You should get your ticket before they are all gone.

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     January 14, 2008 8:54 AM

To date, in our series on Surfing Stats, we have covered the intent, directory structure, data sets and the main application file. (download the code using the download link at the bottom of the the Intro to Surfing Stats post). Now we examine ChartToggle.mxml.

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     January 14, 2008 8:52 AM

To date, in our series on Surfing Stats, we have covered the intent, directory structure, data sets and the main application file. (download the code using the download link at the bottom of the the Intro to Surfing Stats post). Now we will look more in depth at our main application file and examine the layout.

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     January 14, 2008 8:28 AM

To date, in our series on Surfing Stats, we have covered the intent, directory structure and the main application file. (download the code using the download link at the bottom of the the Intro to Surfing Stats post). Now we will look at the datasets.

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     January 2, 2008 9:45 AM

In our series on Surfing Stats, we have covered the intent and the directory structure. (download the code using the download link at the bottom of the Intro to Surfing Stats post) We will now cover the main application file. It is important to note Surfing Stats does not use a framework. Frameworks are powerful code organization tools that contribute to rapid development and maintainability. Since the goal of Surfing Stats is to teach development of a simple application in 4 hours, I made the decision to avoid discussing or implementing any framework. After all, if you do not have the skills to build an application without using a framework, you probably do not have any business using a framework to build an application.

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     January 2, 2008 9:15 AM

I have finished coding my application for my hands-on session at 360:Flex Atlanta. The goal of the session is to walk attendees through building a simple application. You may download the source code for Surfing Stats using the download link.

The Flex framework is very powerful and offers lots of powerful functionality. I had trouble limiting myself in scope. I only have 4 hours to teach so I want to make sure I leave the students with a functional and instructive application.

Without futher ado, I want to introduce Surfing Stats. This application consumes XML data from my BlogCFC installation at www.nodans.com and displays the data in table, bar chart and pie chart format. Each dataset is represented as a tab. Clicking on the tab enables the relevant display options.

In the next few weeks I'll wrap up the course materials of the session. I'll probably blog some to finalize my thinking on the session. I do not expect to trim any base functionality of Surfing Stats, though there are several fancy add-ons in the current version we will cover should the class progress at a quick pace.

As a reminder, 360:Flex Atlanta will be held February 25-27, 2008 in Atlanta, GA. If you would like to learn how to build an XML fed charting application with the Flex Platform, attend my hands on session.

Download

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