Flex Layout with draggable, resizable components
I have been looking for a way to layout elements (child components) within a Flex container that is flexible, resizable, draggable and visually impressive. The main requirements are that a) the individual child elements can be reordered with drag-and-drop, b) elements can be maximized/minimized, c) elements can expand to fill the available space and d) elements can be given a default width and height.
Unfortunately, none of the native Flex components have layout algorithms that are suitable. They mostly implement absolute positioning or a simple vertical or horizontal “flow” layout which can fit elements into the parent container, but without any resizing.
Recently I have found a really nice implementation of layout within Flex called the Adobe Flex 3 Dashboard sample. It implements a “pod layout” which handles all my requirements EXCEPT for the fact that the individual elements (”pods”) cannot be given an initial/default width and height - they simply scale to each take up an equal amount of space within the parent container. The drag and drop functionality also has some nice animated effects.
