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This is from our old friend, Ed Sullivan.

The Adobe Cookbooks application is your one-stop shop for finding and sharing community generated code samples.  One of the great new features of the recently re-designed Cookbooks application is the recipe request feature. This lets users who cannot locate their desired code sample put out a request to other community members. Additionally, fellow community members can vote for specific requests so you can determine at a glance which requests are the most popular.

You can see a list of recipe requests on the home page for each of the supported technologies, (Currently, the Flex Cookbook has the most unanswered recipe requests.) You can also easily stay current on the request queue by subscribing to the uber RSS feed, or you can be notified of requests for specific technologies like Flex.

And while answering a recipe request won't bring you fame and fortune, it will give you:

• The opportunity to have the request you addressed featured in the Adobe Developer Connection
• That warm fuzzy feeling you get from assisting your fellow developers
• The potential to have your recipe included in an upcoming version of the O'Reilly Flex Cookbook
• Visibility on adobe.com via Adobe Cookbook contributor recognition features

And, for a limited time only, every person who addresses a recipe request will be sent a free copy of the Getting Started with Flex 3 Pocket Guide.  Just email Ed Sullivan with a link to the recipe request you plan on addressing and after you publish it, just sit back and wait for your book to arrive!

So if you know how to create a simple shopping cart with Flex 3, what are you waiting for?!

There's been an increase in talk about Twitter lately, so I decided to try my hand at building a simple client that displays Twitter messages in Flex. Turns out, it was even easier than I thought, so I'll share it in a quick blog entry.

I used an HTTPService with the resultFormat set to e4x to get the status information. In the result handler, I set the result to an XML object. Twitter.com has some very comprehensive documentation that cover all the service call APIs and return types here:
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation

To display the Twitter statuses, I used an inline item renderer inside a List control. Simple to do and it looks good for a minimum amount of effort.

You need a proxy page that requests data from Twitter, since Twitter.com does not have an open crossdomain.xml file. In this case, we have an ASP.NET server available with an open crossdomain file, so my proxy page (twit.aspx) is written in C# and put up on that server. I am more familiar with PHP server-side code, so it was a little tricky to get the C# syntax right.

My ASPX syntax uses the System.Net.WebClient.DownloadData() method to do the same thing that the file_get_contents() PHP function does.

If you have a PHP server, there's already an example written in PHP that you can also look at:
http://www.blackcj.com/blog/tag/cross-domain-xml/

Twitter statuses are sent out every 60 seconds, so I used a timer that calls send() on the HTTPService every 60 seconds. This is configurable, too, but there's no point in making the updates shorter than 60 seconds, according to the Twitter documentation.

This example is currently set up so you can use the twit.aspx page on aspexamples.adobe.com as a test page. You just pass a username to it with a GET request, setting the p parameter to the username you want to track. In my example, I hardwired my Twitter address so you can see it running, but you can put any username in there that you want when you build your own client. Please don't use the service for production reasons, or we'll have to lock it down.

Download the files mentioned in this article:
Download file (2K)

Enjoy!

Our Experience Design (XD) team just relaunched Inspire, their external site, http://xd.adobe.com. The XD team contains a bunch of terrific designers and developers, and is responsible for most of the look n' feel in the latest Adobe products.

Honestly, I don't always agree with everything coming out of XD, but I am always amazed at their creativity, visual sensibility, and app development chops. You won't regret taking time to poke around this site.

There's a new Community Help blog at Adobe. It's a good place to get news about new Community Help features, as well as provide feedback about stuff you like, dislike, or absolutely despise.

You can see the blog here: http://blogs.adobe.com/communityhelp/

Some Adobe folks are asking for feedback to help drive improvements to Adobe Labs. Since Flex was one of the earliest releases on the Labs site, I figure some of the readers of this blog might want to participate in the discussion.

There's an open-ended thread in the online forums:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=72&catid=586&threadid=1384250&enterthread=y

We are trying to get as much feedback as possible by in late-August/early-September.