This is an idea of Jonathan Snook, an web designer and developer that I admire and follow.

He propose a new layout system on extending the CSS property “position” by adding value “:matrix (x,y)”. The Matrix Layouts should be like table-based layouts combined with absolute positioning and without any “hacks” for overflowing.

How this should work? You use the position property to specify where the box should be placed within the grid. Have a look at the following example diagram:

It’s a 3 column design but with a little extra pizzazz in the middle column. I’ve also lettered each section by their source order. Now, let’s look at what that code would look like with matrix layouts:

#a { position: matrix(1,2, 1,4); }
#b { position: matrix(2,2); }
#c { position: matrix(2,3); }
#d { position: matrix(2,4); }
#e { position: matrix(1,1, 2,1); }
#f { position: matrix(1,5, 2,5); }

I think this be a kick-ass CSS feature and I would love to use in my layouts. This will bring so much fun to CSS work and I’m sure that others would love it, but there is long way till it’s really implemented. Also will be good to have the Matrix Layout implemented in a CSS framework.

You can read the full blog post here or the Matrix Layout concept here.

Benchmarks are hard, particularly for complex systems. The Census is a Flex application to demonstrate various methods of loading data in RIAs and see how these methods impact performance, bandwidth and client memory usage. Census renders a large chunk of data using Ajax ( HTML, SOAP, XML and JSON ), Dojo, Flex ( SOAP to AS and E4X, XML to AS and E4X, AMF3 and Paged). We can see the Server Exec Time, Transfer Time, Parse Time and Render Time easily.

http://www.jamesward.com/census/

One of my Flex beginner question was “How do I connect Flex with PHP” or any other language and pull the data from a database. I most interested in PHP and I tried with CakePhp AMF plugin but no luck. Then I tried to follow Zend Framework AMF example from their book but the same.

Here is a good video tutorial on how to make Adobe Flex to work with PHP true XML and AMF (Action Message Format). You will learn how Flex WebServices and RemoteOjects work with Zend Framework. For me this tutorial has answer to many questions and I recommend you to have a look at it if you are Flex beginner like me.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/skinnerfam95/videos/1/

As the title say I have start to learn Flex. I’m consider myself a beginner and I will try to post my experience developing Flex applications. So let me start from the beginning ….

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