Some quick feedback on Flex 3

Question

This is my second day with Flex 3 (a first-time user of
Flex), and this is my second day of trying out Flex 3, so, bear
with me if I don't seem to know what I'm talking about.
Because I'm particularyly interested in data interaction I
picked the "Working with Data in Flex Builder 3" section, concept
explanation and samples are good, but in essence most of the
samples' raw data manually entered / hard coded data such as
[{label:"AL", data:"Montgomery"}. I said it's good for it can
easily get a point across quickly, however, it leaves a lot to be
desired in the real world, that is, in most cases imho, I would run
a query or two get data from a database or two, yes, I understand
one can do so with web service, but what if no such web service
exists for such datasets, you have to create a web service first?
don't think it's convoluted? Why not provide direct database
connectivity? Yes, I understand cfc can be called as a web service.
Once again, I think it would be nice more options are available to
access underlying data (after all, Flex is to Present Data in
Appealing and Easy to Grasp fashion.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Many thanks. That's a great debugging technique.
Error: warning: unable to bind to property 'customer' on
class 'String' (class is not an IEventDispatcher)
Now it seems to me my Flex code may have some problem, which
was essentially copied/pasted by Adobe Flex docs. It has the
following 3 sections:
a) app framework/config
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="
http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
xmlns="*" layout="absolute"
creationComplete="customerRequest.send()">
b) HTTPService call
<mx:HTTPService id="customerRequest" url="
http://127.0.0.1:8501/flexApp/getCustomer.cfm"
useProxy="false" method="POST" resultFormat="text">
<mx:request xmlns="">
<companyname>{companyname.text}</companyname>
<city>{city.text}</city>
</mx:request>
</mx:HTTPService>
c) display query data
<!-- display current datasets of "customers" -->
<mx:DataGrid id="dgCustomerRequest" x="22" y="128"
dataProvider="{customerRequest.lastResult.customers.customer}">
<mx:columns>
<mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Customer ID"
dataField="customerid"/>
<mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Customer Name"
dataField="companyname"/>
</mx:columns>
</mx:DataGrid>
<mx:TextInput x="22" y="292" id="selectedCusCity"
text="{dgCustomerRequest.selectedItem.city}"/>
Did I miss the import mx.rpc.http.HTTPService part with
CDATA?
I thought Flex would automatically take care of it if one
uses HTTPService
Sample data:
<customer>
<customerid>ABCD </customerid>
<companyname>DataWeb</companyname>
<city>Roanoke</city>
</customer>
<customer>
<customerid>ALFKI</customerid>
<companyname>Alfreds Futterkiste</companyname>
<city>Berlin</city>
</customer>