Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Submitted My Flex 2 Derby Entry

Worked all weekend and finally got my application in shape enough to enter it into the Flex 2 Application Derby. My entry is a web front-end to a Quickbooks accounting database.

You can view the work in progress at http://shop.is2software.com/is2qb/bin/is2qb.html.

I had two primary goals in mind when I started this proof-of-concept.

1. Determine how to build a xml soap server that would access Quickbooks data using the Quickbooks Sdk. This server could be used to serve data to both windows and flex clients.
2. Determine if Flex 2 could be used to build a full accounting application front-end.

My first goal, the building of the xml soap server took over a month to work out the base mechanisms. In the end, one of the most used request functions has been the raw qbxml query call where I can send the server any query I wish. That way I can view the raw returned response. That made the development speed up dramatically on the flex client side. In fact, I incorporated a xml viewer title window just for viewing the requests and responses.

The second goal has been partially achieved. With Flex 2, I have been able to create a working application where queries can be called via web services and easily formatted in the datagrids. The area that interested me most was the ability to enter new, view existing, and modify existing customer invoices. Master / detail operations with multiple list lookups and calculations are usually very hard to attain in web browser interfaces. But Flex greatly simplified the user inteface screen layouts.

I will detail individually each of the main areas of the application in my next posts.