Besides my innate inability to design anything like a usable interface, the main drawback that has kept me from exploiting Flash is I never could get my head around the "Movie Timeline" metaphor for programming. As we say back home, "It just ain't right."

That all changed with Flex. Now programmers can work with tools they are comfortable with and still take advantage of all of Flash's...well, flash.

His focus is on using the Flex interface as a frontend to create a web service, specifically one to parse and spit back out the information from feed coming from the Zend Developer Zone itself. They use the Zend Framework as a backend system for the mini-application and include a list of "ingredients" that you'll need to get started.

The tutorial definitely goes in depth with plenty of code examples and details to ensure you don't miss a thing - everything from making the bootstrap file out to coding up the Flex interface. In the end, you'll have a simple feed reader that took almost no effort (well, if you're familiar with the Zend Framework) to get up and running.

You can download the complete source code here.