Shipping Estimator in AIR

The fire sales division at work asked me the other day if I could create a program for tracking the flow of fire truck sales. It got me real excited, because I have started getting more into Adobe AIR and Flex recently, and this gives me the opportunity to do something major with Flex and AIR since that is probably what I would use for this project. I have actually been using Flash for about three years now, but I have been stuck on using mostly Actionscript 2.0 whereas Flex uses only Actionscript 3. I will need to really learn AS 3 for this project.

Although I have not yet done anything major with Flex and AIR, I have programmed a few small AIR applications, including a shipping cost estimator that is used by the Accounting department.

The application is very simple as you can see. It contains a form that asks for three pieces of information: the origination zip code, the destination zip code, and the weight of the package. When the form is submitted, it sends an RPC request to the company web server, where a PHP script queries a database that contains zip code information (including distance between zip codes) and gets back calculated shipping estimates for several different shipping services.

This application has come in handy when waiting for direct shipping charges from a manufacturer while the customer needs an invoice ASAP with the shipping charges included in the invoice.

This small application is nothing like the fire truck sales flow application I will be creating, but it is something I can build upon. I am hoping that my foundation in Actionscript 2 and Flash will help me to learn AS 3 and Flex quickly. I say BRING IT ON!!

1. Scott C. says:

   January 26, 2010 at 6:23 pm

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