Kevin Hoyt

I love to blog. In fact, I have three different blogs (including this one) that I use for various purposes. But to be honest, the infrastructure software that supports the technology is still extremely young, and it shows. In a moment, more about what I consider to be various blogging shortcomings, but first…

If you’re a blogger, whether or not you like your existing software, we here at Macromedia want to know about it. What’s your incentive? Take this short and simple survey about your blog authoring style and get a shot at a shiny new iPod Mini (4 Gb, Silver). The next question you’re likely to ask yourself is “Why does Macromedia want to know about my blog authoring style?” Stay tuned…
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Have you set out to use the charting components in Flex 1.5 only to find that what you were hoping to create just wasn’t possible? Perhaps it was possible, but only by extending the existing charts and creating substantial customization? Have you ever thought to yourself that a particular system requirement of your application would be mush easier to implement if only the Flex charts offered an API of some sort?

If any of these statements resonate with you, then it’s time you let the Flex team know! Drop your feedback for the Flex team (as it relates to charts) in the comments of this post, and I will collect and combine them for feedback directly to the Flex engineers.

Ted over at PowerSDK recently posted some tips on using Flex’s HTTPService class, and this got me thinking a little about how people perceive data access with Flex.

Most of the Flex documentation talks about using three core data services which include HTTP services, web services and remote objects. It’s certainly possible to have other services though and it’s even possible to roll your own. For example, you might consider the Flash Communication Server a type of service that leverages RTMP. In this post, I’ll show an example of using a comma-separated value (CSV) file as a data service (which will actually leverage the HTTPService class).
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