Getting Started with Flex

The application that will be discussed in this section is an RSS feed reader. It will perform the following tasks:

• Make a call to the RSS feed site.
  
• Get the item name and description. 
  
• Display them in a table.

Some of the controls and services being used in this example will give you an overview of the controls that will be discussed in the future. First let us create the user interface. The preliminary step is to declare the primary container (i.e. the application container).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

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

</mx:Application>

After the primary container comes the tag that makes a call to the RSS service.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

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

<mx:HTTPService id="httpRSS"
url="http://apmuses.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"
resultFormat="object"/>

</mx:Application>

The HTTPService makes a call to the service present at the site mentioned by the URL attribute and retrieves the response in the format provided as the value for the resultFormat attribute. In this case, it is in object format.

Next comes the secondary container – the panel.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

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

<mx:HTTPService id="httpRSS"
url="http://apmuses.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"
resultFormat="object"/>

<mx:Panel id="reader" title="RSS Reader" width="776" height="100%">

</ mx:Panel>

</mx:Application>