Note: This post is not intended as a tutorial. I'm just sharing my own personal experience with learning FLEX.
Finally, I was able to sit down for a few hours and do some coding with Flex. Well, I didn't write my own code but I think it helps a lot when you type "most" of the code you copy(you don't have to code everything).
As a learner, I want to reduce as much roadblocks as I can. I want to learn and move forward. So I installed xampp which bundles Apache Webserver and MySQL. It also has PHPMyAdmin. I followed a tutorial from adobe which will teach you how to communicate with PHP. You can find it here.
I had an MXML editor but not a PHP editor so I encountered an error right-away.
XML Parser Failure, I knew right away that I forgot to close a tag that I'm printing through PHP's echo function. I modified the PHP source a bit for my own convenience.
<?php
//modified by Lamia, original code
written by Mike J. Potter
$host =
"localhost";
$username =
"root";
$password =
""; //MYSQL bundled with xampp uses an empty space as the default
password
$db_name =
"flextestdb";
$mysql_connection
= mysql_connect($host, $username, $password);
mysql_select_db($db_name);
$query =
"SELECT * FROM users_tbl";
$result =
mysql_query($query);
echo
"<people>";
while ( $row =
mysql_fetch_object($result) ){
echo "<person>";
echo "<userid>" .
$row->user_id . "</userid>" ;
echo "<username>" .
$row->username . "</username>";
echo "<password>" .
$row->password . "</password>";
echo "</person>";
}
echo
"</people>";
?>
The database, the table name and field names are different since I wanted to adhere to my personal way of naming them. Below is the output of the above code. I included the browser output and the HTML source.
If you're working from a blank mxml project in Spket IDE, try pressing ctrl + space to bring-up the code-assist window and type "A", select Application and the mxml skeleton should be generated for you.
Original MXML code written by Mike J. Potter
<?xml
version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!--
======================================================================
Jul 30, 2008 2:23:46 PM
======================================================================
-->
<mx:Application
xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute"
creationComplete="rest_service.send()">
<mx:HTTPService id="rest_service" url="http://localhost/flextest/rest.php"/>
<mx:DataGrid left="0" right="0" bottom="0" top="0" dataProvider="{rest_service.lastResult.people.person}">
<mx:columns>
<mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Id" dataField="userid"></mx:DataGridColumn>
<mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Username" dataField="username"></mx:DataGridColumn>
<mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Password" dataField="password"></mx:DataGridColumn>
</mx:columns>
</mx:DataGrid>
</mx:Application>
And for some nice FLEX application. :)
I tried to create a simple batch program to help me in compiling.
[code]
del *.swf
mxmlc main.mxml
[code]
In the future, I'll try to see if this can be done with Ant.
Thanks to Mike J. Potter for the wonderful tutorial at the adobe website.