Online countdown timer as a Flex RPC application

If you noticed I used a Flex countdown timer in my previous post. Before I wrote the post, I searched for a reusable online countdown component and could not find anything decent looking. So I decided to create one on my own. Now anyone can create a custom countdown timer using this page. Once set up, one can generate HTML markup for importing the timer into any web page. The generation process uses Flex RPC and WebORB for .NET to save data in a database and to assign a unique ID for the timer. The ID is used to load the timer's config data when it is imported (like we did with the previous post)

In overall it was a very enjoyable experience. It took about 3 hours to complete the project (both client and server side). Flex Builder simply rocks, I cannot get enough of the tool. The only unresolved caveat is using a mx:Panel inside of another mx:Panel. The one on top somehow gets some extra transparency (see the 'timer preview' panel).

This little example goes to show how much faster development is with Flex. Had I used AJAX, I'd still be debugging the JS differences between IE and FF. In fact, if someone is up for the challenge and want to try to create something similar (hopefully something identical) with AJAX, I am very curious how fast you can do that. Please post about your experience here...

On the other hand, if you would like to improve the example, you can get the code from the page linked above. Feel free to contact me with any code updates. One thing I would like to see changed is some additional styling and perhaps resizing ability of the timer panel. Perhaps a drop down with various styles would offer the best user experience.