I have been trying to learn the Adobe Flex framework and Flex Builder. In order to use flex, you don't need Flex Builder, but it is a nice application built on top of the Eclipse IDE. It comes in the standalone version, or it can be a plug-in to Eclipse. Either way it is Eclipse re-purposed for writing flex and actionscript. I wanted to see how easily it was to connect to a webservice, so I found a nicely documented webservice to connect my application to.