Tour de Flex – Web Version Released!

Tour de Flex - Web Version

Tour de Flex for the Web was released today! It’s hosted on the Adobe Devnet site where we also now keep the Tour de Flex AIR app download, and looks almost identical to the AIR version, minus the AIR-only samples for obvious reasons.

The web version contains deep linking integrated into it so it’s now very easy to bookmark samples for later reference, or to email a sample to a co-worker etc… This version is also a great option for those who are new to Flex or might want to explore it, but are not ready to download the full AIR application. When they are ready to download it, all they have to do is hit the Install button at the top of the page to get it.

I had some unique challenges in creating the web version, since we use HTML links to supply our content (in the form of SWF or HTML) for all of our tabs within the illustrations and documents, and obviously could not use the handy dandy HTML component as our AIR app used. Christophe Coenraets had been down this path before and suggested using iFrames to hold the content in the tabs, and advised on how he had done something similar, so that is the path we chose. The final result took a little bit of trickery to make the iFrames behave with the resizing of the browser window, popping up and hiding of other windows etc, due to the z-order of the iFrame always taking precedence over the Flex component, but ultimately worked! I plan to write another post about how this was done in case it may help others who need to build something like this in the future… so check back soon!

Also, be sure to check out Greg Wilson’s blog for the rest of the info on the Tour de Flex 1.2 AIR app updates and more!