Yesterday the Adobe Flex team launched a Drupal powered application that showcases applications built with Adobe Flex. The new Flex Showcase is online now at http://flex.org/showcase_app.

The backend of the application uses Drupal, along with the Services, AMFPHP, Vote up / down and CCK modules. The front end of the application is written in Adobe Flex, with custom components written in Flash.

Drupal was chosen for the application because we needed a PHP framework that supported user registration and management, content management, categorization and tagging, and comments. Drupal was the best choice for these services, and with the work that Scott Nelson had already done with the Services and AMFPHP modules, the choice was easy.

This was a big decision for us. The Flex showcase is the most popular page on the Flex.org site, which had over 100,000 visits in August alone. (Its even more popular than the front page.)

The new application replaces a static HTML page that had screenshots and a one line description of applications. Developers can now add and manage their own applications, and include more screenshots and a longer description.

We created a number of new services for this application and fixed some bugs in the existing services module. All that code has been provided back to the Services/ module. We have contributed all our fixes back to the community, and have only kept one module that is specific to the Flex.org website as non open source. We haven't decided on whether we will open source the Flex application yet. We're thinking about it.

If you have any questions about the application, please let me know. The Services handbook page has some links on how to get started with Drupal and Flex, and Flex.org has a number of great resources for Flex. http://flex.org/php/ is your best bet if you're a PHP developer.

Thanks!

Mike

Mike Potter
Adobe Systems Inc.
Flex Developer Marketing Managerhttp://flex.org/

Drupal version: Drupal 5.x