Introduction to FLEX

Introduction to Flex

Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference 2009
November 2009

Jeremy Anderson

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding Rich Internet Application (RIA) platforms like Flex for some time now, and many books written on how to do Flex development, however much of what’s being taught just will not scale beyond the trivial examples. Even the more popular MVC frameworks are fraught with fragile architecture, untestable code and anti-patterns.

In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to develop scalable, robust, and testable Flex applications using the Model View Presenter (MVP) design pattern. Specifically, we’ll using Atomic Object’s Presenter First refinement of MVP. We’ll start with an existing web application developed in Ruby on Rails and put a fresh new face on it using Flex.

Some of the things we’ll touch on in this tutorial are:

• How to implement the Model View Presenter pattern in Flex.
• Writing unit tests using FlexUnit4.
• Leveraging mock objects for unit testing.
• How to connect to a RESTful web service using Flex.
• How to leverage continuous integration for your Flex application.

Attendees are expected to have a laptop with a working Ruby on Rails installation as well as MySQL and an editor/IDE that they are comfortable in. No prior experience developing with Flex is required, some familiarity will be helpful as we will not be covering the basic concepts in very much depth.