Chicago Flex

Creating Mashups with Adobe Flex & AIR is a friends of Ed book written by Chris Korhonen, David Hassoun and John Crosby. The purpose of this book is to give an overall idea on how to integrate various popular websites’ APIs into one application written in Flex for use in a web browser or on the desktop.

I think that the title is a bit misleading. When I think of a mashup, I think of an application that takes data from one source and applies it in a unique way to another source. For example, an application that takes a zip code and pulls all the flickr photos for that zip and then displays their location on a Google map. Most of the implementations in this book tell you how to interact with various APIs but all of them separately, but in the same application. The book does give you the know-how to connect to these websites, but creating the unique mashup is up to the reader.

Despite that gripe the book is well written and is a quick read. There is a lot of information in there, and unless you’re in front of a computer, or have a good understanding of Flex, it could be a tricky read.  (I read this on the train and there is a lot of coding examples that I just had to trust to be correct, but I could follow along with.) I think this book is not for a someone just beginning with Flex, due to the fact it goes over a surprising amount of more advanced concepts, but if you’re up to the challenge it is worth the time - especially to anyone who plans on using external APIs to create their application.

The book also has quite a bit of information about how to and what to do when creating an AIR application, all the basics and even more advanced features that are pretty typical of an app on either a Windows or Mac (such as dragging and dropping of files and OS X dock icons).

Creating Mashups with Adobe Flex & AIR is recommended if familiar with Flex or AIR and want a head start for developing with web APIs and even more advanced concepts inside of Flex. It is all over the place. The book is a Swiss Army Knife of information, but doesn’t stay with specific topics long enough to be the end-all-be-all for your Flex development needs.

Article written by Ryan Jones, www.ichibod.com. He current works for Abelson-Taylor in downtown Chicago as a Senior Interactive Developer.