Joe Lennon

In November 2008, a tutorial I wrote titled “Implement a Facebook photo album using the Flex SDK” was published on IBM’s developerWorks website. The tutorial begins by introducing the Facebook platform and explaining how a Facebook application is created. It then moves on to the open source Flex SDK and the MXML markup language and ActionScript scripting language that are used to develop Flex applications. At this point, a simple Flex application is created to introduce the reader to the development and deployment of Flex applications. After this, the tutorial shows the user how to create a feature-rich photo slideshow (with transitions and controls) that uses the reader’s Facebook photos and is deployed to their Facebook profile.

The following is the description of the tutorial on the IBM developerWorks website itself:

Adobe® has released the free, open source Flex SDK framework to enable developers to create Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). The Flex framework provides you with a method of creating cross-browser, cross-platform Web applications that is quick and simple. Flex applications run in the Flash player, which is installed on the majority of Internet-connected computers, but Flex also provides you with an object-oriented user interface framework similar to Java™ Swing. In this tutorial, develop a Facebook application in Adobe Flex that displays a slideshow of a user’s Facebook photo albums. The Facebook application will contain a profile box listing all of the user’s photo albums, each a link to a Flex slideshow of that album. The Flex application will use the Facebook REST API to fetch the photos of the selected Facebook album and dynamically generate the slideshow.

Read the tutorial at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/wa-dw-wa-facebookflex.html