Overview
Building and Deploying Flex Applications for the Desktop is intended for all Flash Developers who are interested in building Flex applications that will work in both the browser and on the desktop. A basic understanding of Flex and moderate knowledge of ActionScript is encouraged. The discussion will be broken into three sections:
1. An overview of Macromedia Flex and Macromedia Central. We will discuss each platform and how they differ from traditional Flash development. We will also show some of the benefits of developing for Central.
2. Demonstration of the Flex Amazon Browser, a Flex based application that is built for both the browser and the desktop. We will show the features of the application and what advantages there were to building the app for Macromedia Central (agents, alerts, etc.)
3. Discussion of how to architect applications that target multiple platforms. Although this discussion could engulf an entire 50 minutes, we will briefly discuss some patterns that you may want to adopt in order to better organize your code for multiple platform development.
4. Demonstration of the techniques used when building a Flex application that needs to run in the Central environment. Although most of the code is portable to Central 1.5, there are a few workarounds that will need to be implemented for all Flex apps to be able to run within Central.
1. An overview of Macromedia Flex and Macromedia Central. We will discuss each platform and how they differ from traditional Flash development. We will also show some of the benefits of developing for Central.
2. Demonstration of the Flex Amazon Browser, a Flex based application that is built for both the browser and the desktop. We will show the features of the application and what advantages there were to building the app for Macromedia Central (agents, alerts, etc.)
3. Discussion of how to architect applications that target multiple platforms. Although this discussion could engulf an entire 50 minutes, we will briefly discuss some patterns that you may want to adopt in order to better organize your code for multiple platform development.
4. Demonstration of the techniques used when building a Flex application that needs to run in the Central environment. Although most of the code is portable to Central 1.5, there are a few workarounds that will need to be implemented for all Flex apps to be able to run within Central.
Attendees of this session should be able to leave being able to build a simple Flex application that will run within Macromedia Central. They will have a checklist of what changes will need to be made to their Flex application and best practices for how to architect those changes into their application framework. They will also be able to recognize many of the pitfalls of developing Flex applications for Central and workarounds for these issues. Attendees will also have access to the source of a simple Flex application that was built for Macromedia Central. They will be able to use this code as a template for building their own applications.
