Sample Chapter
Sample Chapter Hello Flex 4 Peter Armstrong MANNING Hello! Flex 4 by Peter Armstrong Chapter 3 Copyright 2010 Manning Publications Brief contents 1GETTING STARTED 1 2ACTIONSCRIPT 3, XML, AND E4X 25 3HELLO SPARK: PRIMITIVES, COMPONENTS, FXG AND MXML GRAPHICS, AND EVEN VIDEO 50 4SPARK CONTAINERS, VIEW STATES, EFFECTS, AND STYLING 89 5HALO FLEX 4: USING DATAGRID, NAVIGATOR CONTAINERS, AND POPUPS 121 6BUILDING USER-FRIENDLY FORMS USING FLEX FORMATTERS AND VALIDATORS 136 7CAIRNGORM IN ACTION: SOCIALSTALKR (TWITTER + YAHOO! MAPS)157 3 Hello Spark: primitives, components, FXG and MXML graphics, and even video n this chapter, you’ll start learning Spark, which is the new set of components, containers, and I graphics primitives in Flex 4. This will be a “how- to” chapter: we’ll save diving into the Spark component model until the next chapter (which discusses view states, containers, CSS styling, and skinning). This chapter provides enough examples of using Spark that when it comes time to tackle the theory you’ll have plenty of examples in your head. In four of the five workshop sessions in this chap- ter, we’ll build a fairly small, self-contained Tes- ter.mxml app that has all the code in the example. In session 14, however, I’ll mix things up a little: we’ll build an “Only Connect” game (that bears strong resemblance to a certain trademarked game). We’ll start with a game board that I drew in Adobe Illustrator and saved as FXG. (I’m pro- viding the FXG file I created, so you don’t need to have Adobe Illustra- tor.) We’ll then build a fully functioning game based on this FXG, before 50 SESSION 11 Spark primitives 51 refactoring it and then adding logic for detecting victory.
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