I have recently been getting to grips with Adobe Flex for a project that I’ve been working on, and thought a fun little bit of work would be to write a Flex Gravatar Control. I’d done the equivalent for ASP.NET, so why not have another go?

Incidentally, I don’t know whether there’s much call for a Flex Gravatar control – if you’re reading this and find a use for it – great, but I hope that there may be something in this post that helps a budding Flex developer too.

The general idea of component development is to package up a reusable bit of code for use in applications. Since a Gravatar is just an image, it seems natural that the Gravatar component extends (otherwise known as inheriting) the Flex mx.controls.Image class. The benefit of inheritance here is that we get a bunch of functionality for free that we can use as a basis for our control. We’ll be adding our specific Gravatar code so that the image shown is a particular user’s Gravatar. Continue reading →