The other day, I was talking to one of my colleagues at work about my interest in all things Flex and seemed to strike a chord with him, when he popped this question, “So can I see some of your work?”  It was a *gotcha* moment for me, since I’d not put up any of my Flex projects live on the Internet. Hence this post!

In my final year of college at NITK Surathkal, I was in charge of an event called Virtual Bounty, an online treasure hunt. This was an application that I had designed using Flex.

What is Virtual Bounty?

Virtual Bounty is the online treasure hunt that is held during Engineer (NITK Surathkal’s annual technical festival). As the name suggests, bounty hunters start off by getting a question and answering it correctly takes you on to the next question in the hunt until you reach the treasure. Each year, the quiz question setters make use of a ‘theme’ modeled on a comic book superhero.

The sponsors for Virtual Bounty were Adobe, and they wanted the Virtual Bounty application to be run on the Flash platform using Adobe Flex. The theme for the questions was “Rich Internet Applications” and the central character of the hunt was Batman.

All that’s fine, but tell me what went into designing it?

• User Interface- Adobe Flex and Photoshop
• Backend Scripting – PHP
• Interfacing between PHP and Flex- AMFPHP
• Database- MySQL

Can I still play it?

The Virtual Bounty application is available over at: http://vbounty.tekyt.info

The original application required you to register on the Engineer site and then play the game, but you can log in with any username and password that you wish to use (but do note it down somewhere, so that you can log back in). On first login, you are required to choose a ‘nick’ that you will be known by, and which will be shown on the leader-board. Please do take a cursory glance over the guidelines.

NITK has always had a strong quizzing culture, and that is evident when you see the quality of questions. Though the quiz sounds theme specific, the questions can be attempted by anybody. Remember Google is your friend.

When is Virtual Bounty going to be held this year?

Virtual Bounty is held every year as a part of Engineer, and this time Engineer is slated to held between 22nd – 25th October 2010. Do check out http://www.engineer.org.in and especially the business events

Back to the technical stuff

It took me about a week to design the application, and write the backend code. I simply loved using AMFPHP, it provides a great debugging tool, called the AMFPHP browser which you can use to test your Remote Object method calls. If you want me to share the source code of this project with you, please drop a line here

Credits

A big thanks to the Adobe India Evangelist team – @hsivaram, @sujitg and @sriragam in the design and debugging of the application.

Kudos to LWSam, Hanni and others for the questions.

…and the Technical Team at Engineer, led by @trivikram (I was a part of his team), which helped create the buzz about the fest and ‘redefined it on the web’