- Introduction
- Setting up the server
- Creating the entities
- Creating the database schema
- Loading the entities
- Creating new entities
- Deleting entities
- Updating entities
- Conclusion
UPDATED FOR FLEXTRINE 0.6.5!
After numerous requests I have finally sat myself down to write a basic tutorial for using Flextrine in a practical and simple Flex application.
What is Flextrine?
In a sentence, Flextrine is an open-source solution for reading and writing AS3 objects to and from a remote database. Flextrine doesn’t really do anything that you couldn’t do by hand using PHP and AS3 code, but it removes most of the grunt work and standardises client-server database interactions. All being well, database aware Flex applications coded using Flextrine are shorter, more readable and more maintainable.
Documentation for Flextrine is available in its Google Code wiki and its definitely worth having a skim through before beginning the tutorial.
What shall we build?
In this tutorial we are going to demonstrate some of Flextrine’s functionality by building a simple online contacts manager. The application will allow us to create, edit and delete contacts, each of which simply have names and telephone numbers. In order to demonstrate some of Flextrine’s associations we will also allow the user to put contacts into groups.
Note that the purpose of this tutorial is to demonstrate Flextrine rather than Flex, so we won’t be using any frameworks (apart from Flex itself) and where there is a choice between an elegant programming solution and just keeping it simple we’ll be going for the simpler option :)
Requirements
To run through this tutorial you will need the following:
- Flex SDK 4 (free from Adobe)
- A nice Flex IDE – I personally use the wonderful FlashDevelop, but Flash Builder 4 will do just as well
- A web server running PHP 5.3+ and MySQL (WAMP for Windows and MAMP for OSX are good choices)
- Download the complete source code for the tutorial and save yourself tedious typing! This does not include the Flextrine AS3 code so you will need to add the source code or SWC to your classpath manually before compiling.
Lets begin by installing Flextrine and its dependencies.