There are a lot of Flex Explorer applications available on line. These explorers can really help when you want to refresh your knowledge on the Flex capabilities or when you plan to fine tune specific styles or effects.
Whether you’re trying to design a good looking button or data grid, configuring a fancy glow effect, implementing a complex regular expression, configuring a BlazeDS channel or just searching for inspiration; there is probably a Flex Explorer for you.
Here is my own list of explorers, that I also gathered in my Flex Tool Box page for quick and easy reference.
Flex Component Explorer
The Flex Component Explorer lets you browse through the huge list of available Flex core components. For each of them, a small sample application (corresponding code is available) shows how the component is rendered and behaves. Even if you can’t change the component configuration, this remains a useful tool when you’d like to learn more of a component that you never used so far.
Tour de Flex Explorer
The Tour De Flex Explorer is available on line but can also be installed as an AIR application. It extends the Flex 3 Component Explorer by adding Flex 4 Spark components description, coding techniques examples, Flex Data Access information, Flex frameworks introduction and much more.
Flex Chart Sampler
The Flex Chart Sampler (from Ely Greenfield blog) lets you interactively discover the Flex Charting components.
Flex Style Explorer
The Flex Style Explorer is probably the one I use the most. You can use it to style interactively any component, see how looks the result and export the result as a CSS file that you can use in your projects.
Flex Enhanced Button Skin Explorer
The Flex Enhanced Button Skin Explorer(from Daniel Wabyick blog) is an explorer dedicated to the EnhancedButtonSkin available in FlexLib.
Adobe® Kuler™ Color Themes Explorer
The Adobe® Kuler™ Color Themes Explorerallows experimenting quickly with color variations and browse color themes from the Kuler community (can be downloaded as an AIR application).
Flex Filter Explorer
The Flex Filter Explorer (from Joe Johnston blog) lets you define your flex filter interactively and generates the corresponding MXML to include in your projects.
Flex Easing Function Explorer
The Flex Easing Function Explorer (fromJames Ward blog) allows experimenting with ease functions that allow applying non-linear motion to effects.
Flex Distortion Effect Explorer
The Flex Distortion Effect Explorer (from Alex Uhlmann blog) demonstrates fancy distortion effects such as Flip, Pop, Cube rotate, Door and much more.
Flex Reflection Explorer
The Flex Reflection Explorer (from Wietse Veenstra blog) demonstrates beautiful reflection effects using the ReflectionManager provided class.
Efflex Explorer
The Efflex Explorer (from Efflex.org) demonstrates the effects available when using the open source Efflex library.
Flex Regular Expression Explorer
The Flex Regular Expression Explorer (fromRyan Swanson blog) lets you define your regular expressions from the explorer and check immediately whether they work or not by providing test data and look at the result. This explorer also provides a very good on line help that should allow you not be afraid by regular expressions anymore.
BlazeDS Channel Designer
The BlazeDSChannel Designer isn’t really an explorer but I thought it would be useful to mention it here. It provides an easy and interactive way to configure your BlazeDS channels and outputs the services-config.xml corresponding to your options.
