Reading an RSS feed with Flex 2

RSS feeds are a common way for Web site owners to provide information to the public, usually as a series of news items. Each news item is provided using a standard XML language so it can be read with an RSS reader or aggregator. In this article, I want to show you how to create a Flex 2 application that consumes an RSS feed.

We'll grab the feed from the Adobe xml news aggregator at http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/. This aggregator displays news items from several different sources. We'll display a list of headlines from the news feed in a List control. When we click a headline, we'll see further details about that news item. We'll also be able to open the item in a Web browser to see the full details.

Creating a Flex image gallery – part 2

Welcome to the second article in our two part series on creating an image gallery using Flex Builder 2. You need to complete the first part of this series before you start this article. In part 1, we created a simple photo gallery application that loaded external photos and displayed their title. In this article, we'll add styling to the application and load the details of each photo from an XML document.

I want to cover

• Styling the interface
• Adding a fade in effect to the images
• Creating the XML for the image list
• Loading the XML document
• Finding information in the XML document

Creating a Flex image gallery – part 1

Welcome to part 1 of this tutorial series on creating an image gallery using Flex Builder 2. In this two part series, we'll build an image gallery application that loads external images. In part 1, we'll create the application and I'll show you how to load external photos and display a title. You'll be able to use buttons to navigate through the images in the gallery. In part 2, we'll add styling to the application and load photo details from an XML document.

In this article, I want to cover the following topics:

• Setting up the project
• Creating the application interface
• Creating the list of images to load
• Showing the first image
• Creating the navigation buttons

In the second article in the series, I'll cover

• Styling the interface
• Adding a fade in effect to the images
• Creating the XML for the image list
• Loading the XML document
• Finding information in the XML document

Styling Flex components

One common requirement for developers is to be able to change the appearance of the components in their applications. In Flex, there are lots of ways that you can do this including working with CSS, ActionScript and adding skins or themes.

In this article, I'm going to explore the first two methods. I'll show you how CSS styles work in Flex and how to write ActionScript to create, modify and remove style declarations.

Even though you could use any text editor, I've assumed that you're working with Flex Builder for this article. I've also assumed that you're familiar with Flex Builder and that you've already built some simple applications. If not, you may want to go back and read some earlier articles in this series.