Book excerpt: Wrox's Professional Flex 2 is one of the first guides to Adobe's (Macromedia's) new web application development platform. Flex experts Simon Barber, Rich Tretola and John Bennett share their experience with Flex 2, and teach readers how to leverage the platform to build rich internet applications. Professional Flex 2 relies heavy on practical examples, making this a hands-on guide that will get readers up and running with Flex 2 quickly. Topics include: Building applications with Flex Builder Flex programming model Using Actionscript 3.0 Developing applications in MXML Creating UIs with Flex controls and containers Data access and interconnectivity Creating custom flex components Charting Testing, debugging and deploying Flex applications and more