Using encapsulated components instead of reinventing wheels in code have been around from some time, for both GUI elements and nonvisible functional blocks such as communications protocol handlers. Here is a brief sampler of some for Adobe’s Flex 3 development tool.

Library components have many advantages that have been exploited in desktop applications at least since Borland introduced the Visual Component Library in the early 1990s, although probably the oldest would be Seymour Cray’s development of tokened execution blocks in the early 1960s for the CDC 160A computer.

The web world, based on html and css scripts for presentation and javascript for interaction, has not been able to take advantage of encapsulated components for a variety of reasons, but the new rich internet applications are increasingly using them. They not only offer excellent user experiences  and desktop-like responsiveness, but simplify and accelerate software development, as well as increase reliability and code reuse at a modular level.

This book demonstrates a sample of Flex 3 UI components from a variety of vendors, generally organized into functional areas such as image manipulation, audio and video management, graphing techniques and data visualization.

The book’s first chapter starts with a general high level overview of the Flex development environment, with a tacit assumption that the reader is proficient with developing and managing compiled code. Those who may not be familiar with Flex itself can pick up the overall concepts quickly if they have any experience with XML, on which Flex’s mxml structure is based. The logical glue that Flex requires is done with ActionScript, a C-like compiled language based on the E4X programming language extension.

The book includes a chapter outlining how to setup Flex projects, as well as how to convert the several component packages into a form that can be used directly within Flex. The examples’ server side is based on Apache and PHP, but the DDL and datasets as CSV files are made available for those who use other backend technology stacks. All the example code, except for the vendor components, can be downloaded from the publisher’s website, which includes the Flex projects, example SWFs, images and datasets.

The subsequent chapters highlight vendor components in broad functional areas. These components are not provided, but must be obtained separately from the respective vendor sites, with most of available on a trial basis.

There is a chapter that outlines how Flex components can be built, which is limited to how the project would be setup in the development tool.

This book, again, is a sampler of Flex components that extend the native set that comes with Flex Builder’s framework. The code examples show how these can be folded into a Flex project, but there is very little on how to extend them. Similarly, examination of Flex’s workings, such as mxml layout precedence and ActionScript code annotations or descriptions, is limited.

Flex 3 Component Solutions by Jack Herrington, ISBN 9781430215981, published by friendsofed, 399 pages organized into 16 chapters and a light index. Available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

© Copyright 2010 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG

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Tags: Flash, flex, ria, rich internet applications, ui components

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