Nathan Levesque

As I had mentioned before I presented a demo application on Monday for Flex. The best example I could come up with that wasn’t another overused Flickr demo was an RSS feed reader named “Feeder”. It demonstrated simple data services (HTTPService), databinding, Flex Builder’s Design vs. Source views, and some ActionScript event handling. I also quickly copied the code over to an Adobe AIR application just to show that most code could be resused between vanilla Flex and Flex/AIR.

I also made a point to do this in as little code as possible. In fact, it came out to exactly 30 lines of code and took about 15 minutes to code/explain. Realistically, I could have done less, but I wanted to make an app a little more significant than something that displayed RSS items in a DataGrid.

I’ve attached the source code for your curiosity. Feel free to comment and I would love to see anything anyone creates with this:

Feeder MXML Code

I have to admit for a steadfast love of RSS. Without it I no doubt would spend hours each day combing sites for news - well, I still do to a degree. I have to say that checking RSS feeds is without a doubt an addictive behavior. So who wants to start up a support group? RSSers Anonymous anyone?

At any rate I have to say that at least 70% of the items that drop in my aggregator of choice are complete garbage, clones of other posts, posts about posts I’ve already aggregated, or some other mundane category of blog post that I generally won’t bat an eye at.

Of course, I should note that at least 30%-40% of my incoming items are from a couple of aggregator themselves. Would probably do me some good to weed those out at some point. Of course I don’t really have the time, I have blog posts to read!