After spending the last month in java land in a perpetual state of frustration, I needed a break, and went back to the blissful world of Flex. I even toyed around with JavaFX. The only reason I can see that taking off, is because of the multitude of open source Java libraries available. Anyway, this isn't about Java.
I needed to have a confidence booster and have a little fun, so I decided to take on a little project. I am a big movie fan, and sometimes I like to find out if an actor (I'm using actor as a gender neutral for both men and women) as acted any movies with another actor. There wasn't a real easy way to do this on IMDB so I thought why not create my own. Unfortunately, IMDB does not have an API to pull movie and actor names from, but I did find the free movie database. It's free for my purposes at least, since this was just a pet project. To display the links and movies, I used the FLARE library's force directed layout. I suppose one of the other layouts would also work. Because of the ease of use of Flare and FLEX I was up and running in a day and half, and most of that half was tweaking to get the different things to work right. I know the user interface is a bit crappy, but I was mostly interested in the back end and having something work.
Currently under "beta", and perhaps perpetually so. Here are some quick instructions.
You can search for just one actor to see their movies by just entering the name in the first box and clicking find. You can search for both actors and find their links and all their movies, or check the checkbox to just see the links. Double click on the box to get more info about the movie, and double click on the actor to get more info about the actor. Hover over the items to find the name of the movie or actor. You can hover over the link to find out what job they had (actor, producer, etc...), but this doesn't list all the jobs, hence why this is still under beta. Pause and Resume buttons will pause the layout from moving the whole time.
The app is available here, and the source code is available here. You will need your own API key though.