General Approach to Web Application...

Question

Flex is nice. I like it. Build a whole website in Flex and
pull information from XML or ColdFusion. Make calls without leaving
the page. Nice.
But...
From a user point of view, it is nice to be able to send an
URL to a friend for them to click on to get to a particular "page"
within a Flex-app. Can that even be done in Flex without starting
from the homepage?
Or an even simpler thing. How about creating a link from one
"page" to another "page" within a flex app. Can that be done? I'll
give you a more descriptive example if you don't know what I mean.
Let's say you are nytimes.com and you have lots of articles, and
one arbitrary article/record mentions Adobe. It is custom to link
to Adobe's stock quotes from within an article. In html, that would
be pretty simple to achieve. How does Flex do it?
Those are two simple examples that are easy to achieve in
html which connects the www. Search-robots requires links, but I
don't know about robots going through flash-files.
What kind of work-arounds or approaches or measurements
should I take to build flex-applications that can deal with
every-day internet tasks. To always start at a home-page is not
very cool. It is as annoying as describing to people how to click
their way through a website with framesets.
Please feel free to give me any of your input,
///johan

Answer 1

You have a lot of options. I'll try to answer your questions
in the order you've asked them.
Flex has a history mechanism (the History Manager) associated
with the Flex navigation containers: Accordion, TabNavigator,
ViewStack, etc. If you use those controls to move from section to
section of your application, you can grab the URL in the address
bar and you should be able to give someone that URL.
However, you have to make sure your application does all of
its initialization before jumping to a particular section. For
example, if your application requires data to be loaded first,
you'll need to do that before anyone can access other parts of the
Flex application. Most people use Flex to write applications and
not just web sites that can be done in HTML. Note that we saw "Flex
application" and not "Flex site". So that's something to consider.
The navigators (eg, ViewStack) are commonly used to give the
application "pages". The ViewStack, for example, only shows one of
its children at a time. By changing the ViewStack's selectedIndex
you change the children. You need to set up a Button or LinkButton
control (or anything else you can imagine) whose event handler
changes the ViewStack's selectedIndex.
The Flash Player can only display a handful of HTML tags.
Check the Flex 2 documentation for the specifics. But the
bottom-line is that you won't normally be able to include an
article from another web site in the middle of the Flex
application.
The Flash Player 9 has the ability to include special
metadata that search engines are supposed to know how to extract.
Again, consult the documentation.
I think if you go through the tutorials and examples, as well
as experiment on your own, you should get a better feel for what
Flex is all about.