Tour de Flex
One of the things that really helped me get to grips with Flex was an AIR application called Tour de Flex. It contained demos of each of the bundled Flex components, along with help and source code for usage. It's a nice way to get to know the tools you have at hand when using Flex.
I never linked to it on here though, as it's an AIR "desktop" application, which requires you install it on your PC, so goes against the web-bias of what we're doing.
AIR is a bit like Java. Just like you need a JVM installed to run a Java .jar file, with AIR you need the AIR runtime installed before you can download and install a .air file. AIR apps are based on Flex code, by the way.
Hold on though. Yesterday I read that they've ported it to a web-based version. You can now browse and be inspired by all of the out-the-box goodness that makes Flex the brilliant tool it is. See the navigator pane on the left hand side for a list of components to view.
The site itself is a Flex application and inspiring in itself. Have a play with the search filters and other bits to see other things you can do when you combine the components shown.
Skip to the 
You can subscribe to an individual
didn't know that existed, thanks, the web version also has more examples than the air version
Jake,
Adobe Flex is pretty amazing stuff. Have you purchased a license for Flex Builder ? If you're getting into it, then what other gear, and books do you use to support your flex foray.
The quality and sophistication of the applications you can build is quite compelling..
Thanks
Giulio
Yes, Giulio. I went for the pro license so I had the charts and advanced data grid to play with. Well worth it.
I don't use much else apart from the Flex Builder app. No books. Just example websites and the odd tutorial. There's plenty of help out there without needing books!
What about XPages in Domino 8.5? From what I've read and sense the new Designer is based on Eclipse, it sounds like the experience might be much like working with flex. (Of course you can use Flex with XPages just fine too.)
I'm planning to upgrade to 8.5 in the near future. Other than it's very new, have you heard anything that would make you hesitate to use it now.
"the experience might be much like working with flex"
I'd love to think so Rob, but I very, very, very much doubt it. Flex is inspiring to work with and easy to pick up and run with. From what I've seen of XPages it's nothing like that. At all. By any stretch of the imagination.
I've not delved deep enough in to Xpages yet (not got past the point where I randomly drag/dropping some elements on to a new XPage called "test" really) to appreciate their power (assuming they have some) and so can't compare the features of XPages with Flex.
I have seen enough of them both to know that only one of them will bring me any joy while working with it.
I wish there was a file upload control in there. Any change of getting one of the other multiple file upload controls working in Domino? This one looks nice: http://www.kerkness.ca/?p=50
I would love to dump that IE only DLI.Uploader ActiveX control crap from my sites.
Rob,
Xpages does look great but I have been able to get on with flex a lot faster although they are different beasts. There are some things that I have used with flex that I am not sure how to do with Xpages.
For example in flex I can consume a webservice from the same database that holds the web ui but I am not sure that this can be done with Xpages - something about a lockout condition if the ui and service are on the same server / database - very happy to be corrected if this is not correct.
Also I was able to easily write an agent to create a series of "virtual records" and display these in a view, this can probably be done in xpages but I wasn't sure how
The datagrid in flex is great - I like systems where you can very quickly scroll through data that is held in memory ( i.e. a view ) rather than be given pages progressively - flex is really good at this - it would be nice if the datagrid functionality were included in Xpages at some point. Obviously you need to be careful that you only show sensible volumes of data so for larger databases you would have a small feed for say city and then once the user had selected the city you would retrieve the xml feed for records for that city only
The biggest thing I miss with flex so far though is a rich text capability - this is one of the big strengths of Xpages
I am still getting my head around flex but I hope to post some stuff on my blog at easter
re text books,
I bought two. The first was the Wiley published Adobe Flex 3 - this was great and included examples which could be dwonloaded straight into flex builder as archived projects
The second was the Flex 3 cookbook. I struggled more with this one. It is not a beginners book, the download examples are text files which need to be cleaned up before adding to flex builder ( takes ages as it ssems to get corrupted ) and the chapter numbers consded me to the point where I thought I had the wrong editionand was about to send it back. O'Reilly have this thing about bonus chapters available ( free ) on the web - the thing is that on the web they insert these chapters part way through the book which then throws the other chapter numbers and causes great confusion.
The thing that has been the most useful has been the web. People often describe the Notes / Domino community as very powerful. There also seems to be a fantastic Flex community with a lot of bloggers delivering great code. Interesting a lot of the bloggers are Indian which is good to see, this is not something that you see in the Notes community so much.
some examples
http://blog.flexexamples.com
http://blog.flexmonkeypatches.com/tag/datagrid/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/