Creating interactive dashboards in Flex: Weather dashboard Example

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the order of the day for web developers. Visually stimulating, intelligent and interactive, these applications help you enhance the user experience tremendously. Adobe Flex has been a great enabler to create such RIAs with great ease. Using its extensive framework and ready to use components, coupled along with some third party controls, developers can now build a myriad of solutions in no time at all.
In this article, I'll demonstrate how to create an interactive weather dashboard in Adobe Flex. Dashboards can be of many types - financial, manufacturing, retail, health etc. I have chosen weather dashboard as an example as it is domain agnostic, calls for varied type of data visualization, and is easy to understand. Another reason is that it allows us to connect to external data sources, Yahoo! Weather RSS Feed in our case, and then build the output based on such values.
To build interactive gauges, I've used FusionCharts for Flex – a third party data visualization component for Flex that helps developers build charts and gauges in Flex. This is because Adobe Flex does not natively provide such data visualization components, and building one from scratch can be time consuming and expensive. The application will essentially be a dashboard which consists of various gauges that are updated through a live feed.

Overview

Let's begin by taking a look at what our end dashboard would look like. You can see the live version of it here.

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