Learning Flex 4

• Good book for beginners
• Does not talk about popups.
• Does not talk about loosely coupling by using events.
• Shows login / registration form combined using view states.

Flex 4 Cookbook

• Talks about event passing
• Has two examples related to popups. Does not talk about the popup using event handlers.

Learning Actonscript 3.0

• No mention of popups

Flex 4 In Action

Authors: Tariq Ahmed, Dan Orlando, John C. Bland II, Joel Hooks - publisher Manning

• Revised edition of Flex 3 in Action
• Chapter 8 talks about trees
  • TileList is better than Tile - less memory, quicker to display, only shows viewable portion of data - items rendered on fly, slight pause while scrolling, might make app feel sluggish
    • Tile renders all children at once - this could be slow on slow connection - scrolling will be seemless
  • datagrid can substitute for HTML tables
    • datagrid not ported to spark
  • Tree control - pg 172
    • XML objects are deprecated in Flex 4 - use XMLList and XMLListCollection - XMLList can only be declared within fx:Declarations.
• Chapter 9 - Spark list controls
  • ButtonBar
  • List
  • DropDownList
• Chapter 12 - Application navigation
  • Viewstack - layers child containers
    • use a buttonbar to select
    • Use NavigatorContent for deferred instantiation, Group does not have that.
  • TabNavigator
    • Viewstack with the tab bar incorporated directly
  • Accordion
• Chapter 13 - popups
  • Popups are managed by the PopUpManager
  • Shows binding with two way data binding:

    text="@{_username}"

  • Using events to get the data out of a popup window - creating an actionscript event - better than using the usernameField and passwordField within a component - using the fields couples too closely to specific elements. What if login username was a drop down list of users, the application would have to be changed. The better way to get data out of the window is a user-triggered event. Passing events makes the application loosely coupled.
• RIA contenders: Flex by Adobe, Silverlight by Microsoft, JavaFX by Sun, AJAX
• Chapter 3 - introduction to actionscript