Ordering a pizza seems to be a popular example use case when building applications. Close to a decade ago, when I was first teaching the “FastTrack to ColdFusion” course, students needed help brushing up on basic HTML form functionality and how to work with the submitted results. So, I had them create a “let’s order pizza for lunch” form, which ended up becoming part of the core course.
But Ryan Favro has done a much more impressive job with his Flex Pizza Builder, a Flex application with a really nice data selection interface, a very engaging display, and a cool mashup driven backend. Check it out!
Ryan Favro's Flex Pizza Builder
3 responses to “Ryan Favro's Flex Pizza Builder”
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Cool from a technology/flex perspective.
Not so cool from a customer/usability experience perspective. Having to drag the ingredients to the pizza is completely undiscoverable.
Well meant, but on a computer screen nobody expects to have to work to assemble pizza toppings. One of those "because we can, not because it’s actually useful" demos. -
Cool. More pepperoni and bacon for Ben. 😉
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I like these real world examples except that it’s not always for the "real world". What about half-n-half pizzas, what about light-medium-heavy on the cheese, what about light sauce, and how about thin, pan, or extra crispy? The app is cool for newbies, but just too simple to be a useful for experienced Flex coders. No combobox options for the ingredients, the size of pizza doesn’t change even slightly with size choice, adding double ingredients should show xtra, xxtra, or (2x), (3x) etc.. instead of another list entry. The backend is better although there’s no print functionality, ‘order complete’ does nothing, no customer name search, and you can’t edit the order in case there’s a change.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice Flex demonstration, but I could create the entire app in one afternoon. I wish they’d put some real thought and work into it and add some really cool features you don’t see everywhere, stuff that seasoned Flex coders would appriciate.
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