Getting Started with Flex

Steps

The previous section provided an overview of the components supported by Flex. Now let us have a look at the steps that are required to develop an application using Flex. Typically, there are three steps involved in developing a Flex based application. They are:

1. Create an MXML file.
   
2. Calling server-side components.
   
3. Compile the application into a SWF file.

Among these, the first step can be sub-divided into three more steps. Here are the details.

Create an MXML file

As stated in the previous section, MXML is used to define the UI layout and the controls. A MXML file will, generally, contain the following:

• Containers – Containers are rectangular regions of the screen that contain controls and other containers. There can be more than one container in a MXML file.
  
• Controls – Controls are form elements. They include button, labels, etc.

To create a MXML file, the steps are as follows.

Declaring the root container: The root container is the application container. It represents the entire Flash player’s drawing surface. If XML terminology is used, the application container can be called the root element of the MXML document. The following statement declares an application container:

<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">

</mx:Application>

Declaring layout containers is an optional step. The layout containers provide help in laying out the controls. VBox and HBox are the commonly used containers. VBox is used to lay out the controls vertically and HBox lays out components horizontally. For example, the following statement will lay out the controls horizontally. These containers are also known as constraints-based containers.

<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">

<mx:HBox x="0" y="0" width="100%" height="100%" id="bodyBox">
</mx:HBox>

</mx:Application>

In the above example, the HBox tag has the attributes x, y, width, and height, which represent the constraints.

Adding the form controls: The form controls are used to either collect data or display the result of a process. More than one control can be added to a container. For example, the following statements add two text areas to the existing container.  

<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">

<mx:HBox x="0" y="0" width="100%" height="100%" id="bodyBox">
<mx:TextArea id="myText" text="" width="150"/>

<mx:TextArea id="myText1" text="" width="150"/>

</mx:HBox>

</mx:Application>

Calling server-side components

A Flex application needs to call the server-side components or services to do the processing on the data gathered or the data to be displayed. To do so, one can add a web service or HTTP service. The only condition is that the service should return either a Java object or XML as a response. For example, to access a server-side component that returns an object, one can use the HTTPService tag. The following statement does the same:

<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">

<mx:HTTPService id=”httpService”
url=”http://localhost/message.php”/>

<mx:HBox x="0" y="0" width="100%" height="100%" id="bodyBox">
<mx:TextArea id="myText" text="" width="150"/>

<mx:TextArea id="myText1" text="" width="150"/>

</mx:HBox>

</mx:Application>

There will be more about processing the response in the future.

Compile the Application into a SWF file

To deploy a Flex application, the MXML file needs to be compiled to a SWF file. To compile an MXML file, a tool named mxmlc needs to be used. The following command compiles a MXML file named first.mxml

mxmlc first.mxml

That completes the basic steps for creating a Flex application. Next, let us look at a real world application that follows these steps.