|
Thanks Matt, you just confirmed the feasibility
of what I had in mind based on my understanding of the Flex
documentation. Modifying ASP.NET theme and skins in order to return XML instead
of table based HTML is within the scope of my abilities as a designer, unlike
building Web Services or server logic from scratch. Believe it or not but I spent 3 days full
time parsing dozens of RIA and Web Services resources and documentation across the
Web in order to find answer to those questions with no success. I printed the
entire Flex 2.0 Alpha documentation, spent hours a day on the thousands pages for
weeks, went though every single page of “Developing RIA With Flex”
book which I ordered before it even hit the shelves, and still I do not
understand how to implement the data interconnectivity. Or at least I did not
find a simple way to implement it without the requirement for advanced
programming language skills. Meanwhile, and besides being of interest
for enterprise class - team based web development, Flex is the best thing to
happen since Internet to the whole designer community sic of having their work
limited by what they can do on the server side. We do not ask a Dentist to be
capable of building the electronic component of his client chair in order to
deploy the full scope of his Dentistry skills, right? I believe there is a need for more
accessible training and resources tailored for non programmer audience in
respect to Flex. I have been building the www faces of CGI, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET
web applications for the past 7 years now and this was the time where I had to
learn a little bit of CGI to integrate some sort of interactivity into my work,
not because I like CGI but simply because the software vendor do. Then I had to
learn a little bit of ASP because the best affiliate platform software at the
time was based on this language, and my code was mixed up with this pure
Japanese dialect like if HTML table were not unfriendly enough to start with. And
so on, for every single piece of logic without which a web page would not be
anything more than a piece of graphic. With Flex in hand, none the less a web
site can blow away people from a graphic and user experience standpoint (rarely
combinable until then), but the entire role of webmaster and web designer is
shifting as well. Forums, bogs, newsletter, affiliate program, galleries,
subscription system, pay per view services, integrated video, integrated audio,
audio and video chat?….. No problem! On PC, on Mac, on Lynux, on I would be interested in giving time, work
and effort for any project that would go in that direction so if I’m not
the only one lost here, lets get together on some sort of “Flex for
Dummies” kind of initiative :o) Stephane From:
[email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Matt Chotin If you don’t need to parse the HTML
as XML (i.e., you can take it as a blob of text) then HTTPService would allow
you to do it with a resultFormat=”text”. The problem with
leaving the resultFormat as e4x or object is that your HTML may not be valid
XML. If it is valid XML then you can take it as e4x and may have an
easier time parsing it. The session management should work as long
as the ASP pages were using cookies. Matt From: Hello, I’m developing a social networking website using
“Community Server” portal software based on ASP.NET 2.0, more info
about this product can be found at www.communityserver.com.
My project is to deploy Community Server with Flex 1.5 or 2.0 for the
presentation layer, in replacement of the existing default set of aspx pages,
skins and themes. I would like to do this with the lowest amount code possible,
considering that I can write HTML, CSS or MXML by hand but I’m still
novice with Visual Studio and other languages with which I’m limited to existing
code modification and skinning. With this in mind, my questions are: 1- Can Flex get data from existing aspx pages through
HTTPService, when those pages return HTML (normally intended for direct
browsing)? 2- Is there any requirement or specificities regarding the
data format or structure returned by the aspx templates? 3- Is there any issued related to session management in this
context of HTTPService Post / Get? Thank you all for your time, Stephane B.
|
