Flex Australian Weather Observations

A couple of years ago I put together an application to learn the functionality of Macromedia Central. The backend uses Coldfusion MX 6.1 Webservices, and a bit of CF code to scrape public content from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology web site (with their permission).

I used the same webservice to feed my first demo Flex application. The application is not finished by any means, and only contains data for South Australia and New South Wales weather observations. I have lots of ideas, but ran out of time.

Flex Australian Weather Observations allows you to view weather data and warnings from various weather stations across Australia, as well as animated rain rate radar images and national infrared satellite images.

Observations are updated every hour and radar images are updated every 10 minutes.

Development in Flex Builder Beta 2/3 was very easy. The initial data download when the application starts, contains all state and station information as well as weather warnings. These are bound to the dropdown controls on the left along with a simple filter depending on the state selected.

When you select a station name from the dropdown or by clicking on the map, a webservice retrieves the data for that station which is bound to the text fields on the left.

Radar and satellite images are displayed in sequence with a custom AS3 component. Because of the security features of the Flash Player, I had to use a proxy to grab the images and store them on the server. It would be great if Flex could cache images like Central does. Maybe I will have to wait for Apollo. All I need to do now is convince the BOM to place a crossdomain.xml file on their site!

You will need the Flash Player 9 beta to view the application.

My thanks go to Robin Hilliard from RocketBoots for firing up the Flex development community outside the USA and Canada.

Well done Robin...