Mike Potter

January 5, 2007

Most Popular Flex Book, as a Flex Widget

The other day I posted an entry about the most popular Flex Book at Amazon.com. A short time later, Kyle Hayes wrote me an email wondering how I was tracking that information. I told him I had an XLS file with links to the product information for each book, then I clicked on each link, read the information and inputted it into an XLS file. He thought there was a better way, and quickly created a webpage that looked up the information via Amazon's web services. Yesterday he expanded on that sample, and made it a Flex application.

Widget is probably a better word to describe it. I think this could be fairly useful in a sidebar of a website: reading in XML information, displaying the cover art of the books, and then linking back to Amazon to purchase them. In fact, the widget could also be expanded to allow someone to search for a keyword, then return the most popular books for that keyword, and show them in a number of different views (cover art, data grid etc...).

Nice work Kyle, will be interesting to see how this widget expands in the next few weeks.

Posted by at 8:51 AM on January 5, 2007

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