Creating a slide show with Flex 2.0 Beta 2

In the previous article, I introduced you to the Flex 2.0 Beta and showed you how to create a very simple calculator application using Flex Builder. As you’ll recall, Flex allows you to build Rich Internet Applications without using Flash software. Flex uses an XML vocabulary called MXML to describe interfaces that you can then wire up with ActionScript. Flex 2.0 Beta 2 works with ActionScript 3.0.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to create a photo slide show application with Flex. The slide show will display photos, one-by-one, using a fade-in effect. The photo filenames come from an external XML document. While building this application, you’ll have a chance to learn about the ActionScript 3.0 language. It will also cover the new approach to working with XML - E4X.

Specifically, if you work through this article, you’ll learn how to:

• Create an interface in Flex Builder
• Load an external XML document into an XML object
• Navigate the XML object to extract information
• Add styling to a Flex application
• Add a fade-in effect

You will only be able to complete this tutorial if you have downloaded and installed the Flex framework and SDK from http://labs.macromedia.com/flexproductline/. That means you’ll need to be using Windows with Flash Player 8.5 installed. I’m not going to go through the setup of Flex—you can find that in the previous article.

Let’s make a start!