MACROMEDIA FLEX-GETTING STARTED WITH FLEX User Manual download pdf (Page 125)

CHAPTER 8

Flex for Widgets

Flex 1 was primarily a server-based technology. Flex 2 allowed

to compile SWFs in Flex Builder and then deploy them. Flex

3 gives us a new feature called “runtime shared libraries”

(RSLs), which means that the generated SWFs can be much

smaller than in Flex 2—so small and self-contained that we can

now use Flex Builder to create real widgets for websites. These

RSLs contain the code for the Flex framework and are down-

loaded once to the client and then cached so that they don’t

have to be downloaded each time with the Flex application.

In this chapter, I’ll walk you through creating a selection of

widgets that you can use as templates for your own develop-

ment.

Slide Show Widget

The first widget I’ll build is a small slide show widget that reads

an RSS feed from Flickr and displays the images one by one,

switching out the image every two seconds. Example 8-1 shows

the code for this application.

Example 8-1. Slideshow.mxml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"

layout="absolute"

paddingBottom="0" paddingLeft="0" paddingRight="0"

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MACROMEDIA FLEX-GETTING STARTED WITH FLEX User Manual Page 125