Agile Enterprise Application Development with Flex

Summary

In this chapter, you learned by example how to start enhancing the Flex framework with customized components and classes, such as CheckBox, ComboBox, DataGrid, DataForm, DataFormItem, and ValidationRule. You also saw how to use these components in your applications. The source code for this chapter comes as two Flash Builder projects—the Business Framework, which includes the sample applications discussed in this chapter, and the Business Framework Library, which includes a number of enhanced Flex components (some of them were shown here in simplified form) that can be used in your projects as well.

The clear.swc component library is offered for free under the MIT license as a part of the open source framework Clear Toolkit—just keep the comments in the source code giving credit to Farata Systems as the original creator of this code. You can find the up-to-date information about all components included in Clear Toolkit by visiting the popular open source repository SourceForge, or, to be more specific, the following URL: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit. Make sure that you’ve tested these components thoroughly before using them in production systems.

In this chapter, we reviewed and explained why and how we extended several Flex components. We started with simpler CheckBox and ComboBox components, just because it was easier to illustrate the process of extending components. But then we did some heavy lifting and extended such important components as Form and ...