We put the latest version of Flex into a job this month. We used it for the intranet page at Sky on the night of the local election coverage. It was a bit of a rush to get everything in, but the system was very easy to use. The components all worked together very well. We were reading xml files that were compiled and updated as the results came in. The e4x toolkit made dealing with the xml quite simple. Taking selections from the list and making choices based on the contents were both easy to create but also, more importantly easy to read. We were doing things in a hurry so this was a big advantage.This is the page we were creating. We had originally planned to drive it from web services, but we had late database changes and it was easier to take a predefined xml route than have to be editing server code at the same time as the client side code.

Not using a web service meant that the xml files being transferred from the server, gradually became larger as the night went on. OK for the local elections, but we'll have to do it properly for the General elections later this year. The actual processing was mostly cut and paste, being duplicates of similar searches from the same lists. Being under pressure, we probably didn't do enough object creation, we just hard coded the repeated parts. Next time, definitely. All the bars that you see were defined as mxml components and put into repeater blocks, and it was easy to pick up the colouring from a style sheet. The histos/charts needed to have a custm renderer to have individual colours, but again it wasn't difficult to override the methods of the base mxml components. A good first experience. If you'd like to see the result, we have a page on this site, with the final static xml. 

We also tried out the Apollo release for a slightly less important area. We freated a flex interface which controlled one of the graphics machine to set up the colouring of seats within the Scotish and Welsh assemblies. The system was able to allow different predictions to be put in through the night and for the model to be coloured up correctly with less chance of error. Being an Apollo desktop app, it was able to read local files, and the drive the graphics machine, a vizRT system, through the socket interface. Again, a good experience. The runtime installed easily and the application installed and updated very quickly. No runtime problems at all. We shall use this in the future. I must try the same application on a Macintosh to see the interface and install experience. It should be identical.