iday, I gave myself a mini-crash course in advanced Adobe Flex development.  I learned to use the Timer class -- which is very cool because you can fire off functions after a designated amount of time has passed.  Still haven't dreamed up all the things this could be useful for -- I used it in a slide show, probably the most obvious, fairly pedestrian use of this class.  I'm sure I'll think up more subtle ways to use it.  And I learned t create a configurable component.

This is great.  To date, I've been making Flex apps by putting together building blocks and creating Actionscript functions to make things happen, mostly reading data into a DataGrid widget, and when I've needed a custom component, I've used other people's.  Now I know how to make my own custom component, and how to set configurable variables and act on the values sent to the component.  This opens up new doors, and paves the way for better looking, efficient, and more useful Flex apps.

The php behind this little slide show reads the copy from a database table, and the pictures from a folder, creates arrays of these two collections, and writes an XML file which is then consumed by the Flex app.