As always, when I give a new programming system or language a try, I implement a small project.

The project has to be small, to not waste too much time. And the project has to be non-trivial, to really figure out the potentials of the langage and runtime.

In case of Flex, I started to implement a client-side DB-viewer.

The design goals are:

• It should be generic regarding the datasource
• It should be generic regarding the programming language
• It should support typical operations like sort and filter operations

• when to declaratively specify using MXML and the better write procedural code
• how to bind visual components and data
• how to compile the project into a library

The final solution will run either in a browser or as an AIR application. If you have the one, you immediatly have the other: All is about replacing 3 lines of code.

Weekend trial

Here is the result of a few days work:

Features implemented:

• Fully XML data-driven
• Generic by means data model [server side provides model metadata using XML]
• CRUD: Supports create, update and delete operations
• Inline editing of fields and post
• Each column searchable and sortable

Not bad. To be host: I found some helpful hint on the Flex Examples site.