Rob Dixon

In order to build an Application Starter Kit, I'll start by building a simple Blog Reader application. Yes, I know blog reader apps have been done before. But it's a simple application that showcases remote services, XML reading and parsing, and other features that will be useful for the Starter kit. This Blog Reader will display a list of articles from a RSS 2.0 feed. When you select the title of an article the app will display the text of that article. If I were doing a *real* blog reader application I would use use the XML Syndication Library provided by Adobe on the Labs site. However that would make things too easy, since the library handles all the RSS parsing for you. So I'll stick to a no-frills approach to RSS reading for this example. The app will connect to a RSS feed by using a Flex 2 HTTPService object. A real application might want to connect to more ... (more)