Kevin Hoyt

You’ve been thinking a lot lately about that next killer application you have in mind for when Flex 2 finally hits the streets. The banker in you is eager to get started with as little investment as possible, and you’re in luck because Adobe has announced that there will be a free version of Flex 2 available (SDK that includes the Flex Framework and a command-line compiler). You can get away with just XML over HTTP and SOAP web services, right? Not so fast…
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As a Sr. Product Specialist for Flex, I spend the majority of my time either building out custom demonstrations, or presenting the technical aspects of Flex as various levels. You might have seen me present during the Flex online seminars as an example. That’s a presentation fits into an hour and attempts to address the diversity of the crowd that often participates. As part of that demonstration I generally develop a simple application that consists of a DataGrid, a Button and a WebService. This is great for showing layout management, events, RPC calls and data binding. What it doesn’t show however is any of the Flex Enterprise Services 2 goodness.
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Inspired by my friend Waldo Smeet’s blog entry on using 9-slice and Flash 8 to skin Flex 2 components, it occurred to me that not everybody wants to use the Flash authoring tool. In fact, Flex was created for those enterprise developers who appreciated the power of a ubiquitous runtime, but who weren’t particularly interested in mastering timelines, keyframes, symbols and the myriad of other designer-oriented aspects of the authoring tool. Lucky for us, Flex 2 also includes a very impressive programmatic skinning feature. That’s right, if you can draw it using the Drawing API (which I might remind you has become incredibly powerful with Flash 8), then you can use it as a skin.
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