got irock?

After seeing all the cool things you can do with Adobe® Flex™ 2 (click here for demos), I decided to dive in by creating an online wishlist application which I semi completed a week before Xmas. A few of my friends and family found it quite useful even with the late launch, but look forward to seeing it’s full potential for the next holiday season.

After you register, you can create multiple user profiles with each having it’s own list. This comes in handy for creating separate lists if you have kids that aren’t quite old enough to use the computer/internet. You then can add items to your list(s) by completing a form. (Notice the cool Flex client side validation?) You can reserve items from other user’s lists, edit/delete your users profiles, edit/delete items you added, sort and print lists, and create, join, and manage groups (not fully functional). There is also a functional secret santa feature that is built into the backend, but I haven’t integrated it into the UI yet…an inspiration I got from my buddies that wanted to do a secret santa gift exchange thing this year, and kurtiigeek (who I think is working on a Secret Santa app of his own powered by Ruby on Rails).

I used Flex for the front end with a PHP/MySQL backend. There are still a few bugs and a lot more features like sorting and groups that need to be added, and graphic/animation changes, but so far it works okay. The book I used to get started in Flex:

Some useful sites include: Flex Developer Center, Bruce Phillips’ Blog, Forta.com - Blog, PHP.net , and http://www.deitte.com/archives/2006/02/embedding_html.htm to embed html into a flex application which is pretty neat.

I’ll most likely make the source available once I get everything fixed and features added, which is a nice feature about the Flash Player 9 and Flex.