Flex won’t load data from a server that is not in the domain from which the SWF file originated unless there is a crossdomain.xml in the server’s root.
If you want to allow Flash to access your localhost data, then create a crossdomain.xml file in your public folder, with the following content:

<?xml version "1.0"?>
<cross-domain-policy>
    <allow-access-from domain="*" />
</cross-domain-policy>

Yeah I’m addicted to my Xbox360, and my Xbox Live account.
Developers, check this out:

DunCan Mackenzie created a webservice to retrieve your XboxProfile.

I’m working now on a cool Flex app, which reads my Xbox Profile info.

See the response XML message.

The cool thing about Adobe Flex is that you can run within your mxml file Actionscript.
I love standards and clean code. That’s why I wanted to know how I can run an extern Actionscript.as file.
It’s pretty easy:

1. Create a new folder in your Flex project. – I called it: includes
2. In my mxml I define the extern Actionscript:

include "../includes/scripts.as";
]]>

3. I’ll also define the action into mxml, I want it after a button click:

4. In my includes folder I create an Actionscript: scripts.as:
For example:

import mx.controls.Alert;

private var alert:Alert;

private function init():void {
var alertText:String = “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Suspendisse rutrum metus nonummy augue. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Nulla arcu libero, nonummy non, suscipit a, mollis non, augue. Maecenas porttitor urna vel enim. Nam eget tortor. Mauris facilisis suscipit felis. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Proin nunc turpis, venenatis non, laoreet at, fringilla nec, purus. Sed sodales. Sed turpis. Vestibulum sagittis justo id metus. Sed placerat, nibh lobortis mattis adipiscing, sapien wisi interdum arcu, nec vehicula sem tortor id nibh.”;
var alertTitle:String = “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”;
alert = Alert.show(alertText, alertTitle);
alert.status = “I’m a status message”;
}

That made my day!

I have to say. I love music, so I adore LastFm. But I’m also a lover of Adobe and it’s application Flex. So let’s learn something about Flex, XML webservices and the LastFM API. We are gonna create (with Flex Builder 3), a simple but cool application which loads your artist and playcount information from your LastFM account.

First create a LastFM developer account, it will give you the LastFM API_KEY.
It will also grand you access to the big LastFM API, with LastFM methods and webservices:
Last FM API Dev account.

When you have a LastFM API account, you can access the following URL with your details ([your_key_here] prefill with your api_key and [last_fm_user] prefill with the lastfm username from who you want to retrieve the artist and playcount info from), to receive the XML of your artist info/playcount.

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=library.getartists&api_key=[your_key_here]&user=[last_fm_user]

Check this XML, and see its structure. (we need this structure in Flex!)

<lfm>
  <artists>
     <artist>
       <name>Guano Apes</name>
       <playcount>100</playcount>
       ...
    </artist>
     <artist>
       <name>Felix the housecat</name>
       <playcount>50</playcount>
       ...
    </artist>
  </artists>
</lfm>

Now you have your api_key let’s run Adobe Flex, and create a Flex Project.
Add the following code into the source tab:

This will start a nice Flex panel, with the title: “Favourite Artists”.

Now add the webservice: HTTPService, with the previous mentioned url to the Lastfm XML, and give it the idname: “fetchData”. I added this code above my panel code.
Please note that you have to encode the “&” signs, so Flex sees the URL as one line.

&

We can now add a datagrid, for the Artist column (see headerText), we want to prefill this with
the xml node ‘name’ (lfm.artists.artist.name), and the playcount column with ‘playcount’ (lfm.artists.artist.playcount):

And the button to fetch the xml data. Use your HTTPService id .send() method:

Okay, let’s build and run it in Flex. Wow!

Here’s the complete code: