Sunday, November 23, 2008    
Home My Books Blog ColdFusion About Me Back    

Calendar
<< Mar 2007 >>
S M T W T F S
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
             

Search

Categories
 • Acrobat (2) [RSS]
 • Adobe (71) [RSS]
 • AdobeMAX06 (45) [RSS]
 • AdobeMAX07 (59) [RSS]
 • AdobeMAX08 (46) [RSS]
 • AIR (144) [RSS]
 • Appearances (133) [RSS]
 • Books (69) [RSS]
 • CFEclipse (14) [RSS]
 • ColdFusion (1173) [RSS]
 • Data Services (16) [RSS]
 • Fish Tank (2) [RSS]
 • Flash (108) [RSS]
 • Flex (382) [RSS]
 • Home Automation (3) [RSS]
 • Jobs (100) [RSS]
 • JRun (13) [RSS]
 • Labs (29) [RSS]
 • LiveCycle (23) [RSS]
 • MAX (181) [RSS]
 • Regular Expressions (15) [RSS]
 • RIA (12) [RSS]
 • SQL (38) [RSS]
 • Stuff (505) [RSS]
 • Tips (CF Studio) (80) [RSS]
 • Tips (CF) (795) [RSS]
 • Tips (Dreamweaver) (91) [RSS]
 • Tips (Flex Builder) (2) [RSS]
 • Using CF (140) [RSS]
 • Wireless (100) [RSS]

Other BLOGs
 • Charlie Arehart
 • Lee Brimelow
 • Ray Camden
 • Christophe Coenraets
 • Sean Corfield
 • Mihai Corlan
 • Cornel Creanga
 • John Dowdell
 • Danny Dura
 • Enrique Duvos
 • Steven Erat
 • Kevin Hoyt
 • Serge Jespers
 • Adam Lehman
 • Duane Nickull
 • Miti Pricope
 • Andrew Shorten
 • Ryan Stewart
 • James Ward
 • Greg Wilson
 • Full As A Goog

RSS Feeds
 • Feed
 • Subscribe

Join my mailing list and find out about new books and other topics of interest.

Thoughts, ideas, tips, musings, and pontifications (not necessarily in that order) by Ben Forta ...
NOTE: This is my personal blog, and the opinions and statements voiced here are my own.

Viewing By Entry / Main
March 26, 2007

Ryan Favro's Flex Pizza Builder

Ordering a pizza seems to be a popular example use case when building applications. Close to a decade ago, when I was first teaching the "FastTrack to ColdFusion" course, students needed help brushing up on basic HTML form functionality and how to work with the submitted results. So, I had them create a "let's order pizza for lunch" form, which ended up becoming part of the core course.

But Ryan Favro has done a much more impressive job with his Flex Pizza Builder, a Flex application with a really nice data selection interface, a very engaging display, and a cool mashup driven backend. Check it out!

TrackBacks
There are no trackbacks for this entry.

No trackback URL. Trackbacks are only allowed via interactive form.

Comments
Cool from a technology/flex perspective.
Not so cool from a customer/usability experience perspective. Having to drag the ingredients to the pizza is completely undiscoverable.
Well meant, but on a computer screen nobody expects to have to work to assemble pizza toppings. One of those "because we can, not because it's actually useful" demos.
# Posted By German Bauer | 3/26/07 1:09 PM
Cool. More pepperoni and bacon for Ben. ;)
# Posted By Benjamin | 3/26/07 1:51 PM
I like these real world examples except that it's not always for the "real world". What about half-n-half pizzas, what about light-medium-heavy on the cheese, what about light sauce, and how about thin, pan, or extra crispy? The app is cool for newbies, but just too simple to be a useful for experienced Flex coders. No combobox options for the ingredients, the size of pizza doesn't change even slightly with size choice, adding double ingredients should show xtra, xxtra, or (2x), (3x) etc.. instead of another list entry. The backend is better although there's no print functionality, 'order complete' does nothing, no customer name search, and you can't edit the order in case there's a change.

Don't get me wrong, it's a nice Flex demonstration, but I could create the entire app in one afternoon. I wish they'd put some real thought and work into it and add some really cool features you don't see everywhere, stuff that seasoned Flex coders would appriciate.
# Posted By Clint | 3/27/07 8:55 AM

  © Copyright 1997-2008 Ben Forta, All Rights Reserved