Chicago Flex

The Essential Guide to Flex 3 is also another Friends of Ed book, this one written by Charles Brown.  The book’s intent is to provide a good introductory overview of basic concepts in Flex programming, covering almost all the bases on how to develop simple, yet powerful applications.

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.

From Flex Developer's Journal:

Today, Adobe announced a collaboration with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won't need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

FlexTense code generator: http://www.flextense.net/FleXtenseWeb/Launch.aspx

The above link contains web utility called FlexTense which is web based code generator. FlexTense simply takes WSDL schema and generates all the classes necessary for Flex to access and retrieve data from any database via web service with no further coding on the flex level. Since FlexTense is xml based the web service layer can be written virtually on any programming language and framework.