O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Question of the week: Time to dream a little. If you had an unlimited budget and unlimited resources what application would you build and why would you build it? Please leave comments....

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen was at RIM's annual BlackBerry developer convention today with some exciting news about the ways that Adobe and RIM are working together to bring great experiences to the BlackBerry. In this entry we'll discuss what the announcement contained and why it's important to you.

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over 5 Tips for Unit Testing. Unit Testing and Test Driven Development are a hot topics in the Flash community lately, especially on Twitter. A few weeks ago, after realizing how complex my F*CSS library was getting, I decided to go back and write FlexUnit test for the library in a hope to use TDD moving forward.

At Adobe MAX, the RIA Radio crew sat down with Chuck Freedman, Mike Chambers, Craig Goodman, and Greg Wilson.

I recently came across an interesting problem when we had to access barcode scanners from Flex applications. The scanners came in different models but all were connected to the computer via serial port or USB (Serial2USB). Now, how do you...

If you have had an opportunity to look at the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) you could see that there is a huge opportunity to do interesting multi-user applications without needing to write all of the server side code. However there is the challenge of how do you control who comes into your application and what they are allowed to do. In addition, keeping your application credentials safe in case your SWF file was decompiled. So as the title suggests you can use a service like Facebook to take care of the users authentication and Flash Remoting for the application authentication.

The goal of this article is to help you gain a better understanding of the Decorator design pattern. The Decorator pattern is used to attach additional responsibilities to an object at run time dynamically. Decorators provide a flexible alternative to subclassing to extend the functionality of classes in a hierarchical relationship. The Decorator design pattern utilizes an important OOP concept known as the open closed principal. This means that classes are open to extension but closed for modification. The Decorator pattern also uses the concept of composition, another very powerful OOP concept.

Adobe, a long time player in rich internet applications wants be an active participant on mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Adobe engineers put their minds together and delivered a solution to work around the problem of the iPhone browser's lack of support for Flash. If the iPhone Safari browser will not support the Flash player, let's use the Flash tools to compile a native iPhone application (ipa) which lives directly on the device. This initiative now gives the opportunity for ActionScript developers to develop applications for the wonderful iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

Adobe just released public information about AIR 2.0 and added new capabilities that better tie with the operation systems which gives your application more control while increasing performance. The new version will be deployed on Flash player 10 using Flex 4 SDK. The new features can be split into four main categories: new functionality, additional functionality to existing APIs, platform awareness related to APIs and finally, optimization.

WOW! Can you believe it?! Adobe MAX Day 1 is complete, and we have seen a ton of new and exciting announcements. It's hard to think we have more to go. Being a die-hard Flash developer, you can guess which...