Many Flex books cover the basics—this book does something different, and goes far further. The authors, leading Flash platform developers at Almer/Blank, working with Adobe User Group communities, are the creators of the Rich Media Exchange (RMX), a social media network for Adobe developers. In covering just how the RMX was built, this book contains all the knowledge you need to build similar large-scale Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex. From the inception of the idea through to deployment, the authors show the techniques needed to plan and build advanced applications. You'll learn how to use forms, styles, validators, video, sound analysis, and framework caching, ensuring you make the most of the new features introduced in Flex 3. Powerful applications require solid back ends. This book shows how to hook up a Flex application to PHP back-end systems such as Drupal and OpenAds. You'll learn how various parts of the RMX were built, including the blogs, event calendar, jobs board, and advertising system—elements that come together to really showcase the power of Flex. The RMX is built by Adobe Developers for Adobe Developers—a rewarding community relationship that guarantees results. The same spirit is carried into this book, with the authors wanting and helping to take you to the next level of Flash Platform application development.

In this book you'll learn how to

• Effectively plan, wireframe, specify, develop, and release large-scale Flex applications, and discover what other development tools you'll want to start using immediately
• Make your Flex applications look less like Flex with advanced styling and skinning techniques
• Harness advanced Flex form features, including coding validators and building your custom form components
• Implement a robust advertising system for a Flex application using OpenAds
• Build powerful, custom multimedia players in Flex, including video players with the native VideoDisplay class and from scratch, and music players with advanced sound visualization

Summary of Contents

• PART 1 PLANNING THE RMX
  • Chapter 1 Introduction to Flex 2 Applications
  • Chapter 2 Defining the Application: Introducing the RMX
  • Chapter 3 Planning the Application: Building the RMX
• PART 2 BUILDING THE RMX CORE FUNCTIONS
  • Chapter 4 Preparing to Get to Work
  • Chapter 5 Styling Flex
  • Chapter 6 Collecting and Working with Aggregated Content
  • Chapter 7 Secondary Navigation
  • Chapter 8 Forms and Validation
  • Chapter 9 User Communications
  • Chapter 10 Working with Video
  • Chapter 11 Advertising and Flex
• PART 3 BUILDING OUT NEW FEATURES
  • Chapter 12 Building the Blog
  • Chapter 13 Building the Jobs Board
  • Chapter 14 Building the Event Calendar
  • Chapter 15 Ideas for the Future: Extending the RMX
• PART 4 SPECIAL TOPICS
  • Chapter 16 RSLs and Persistent Framework Caching
  • Chapter 17 Search Engine Optimization for Flex
  • Chapter 18 Building an Audio Visualizer in Flex
  • Appendix The Evolving Flex Scene