February 2008 Archives

Podcast: Scrutinizer, Using AIR to Simulate Your Vision

Andre Charland
February 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

I caught up with Andy Edmonds recently to talk about Scrutinizer which is an AIR app that simulates a users vision or attention while their view a web page. We cover a wide range of topics in the podcast including how vision works, eye tracking equipment, how AIR was used for Scrutinizer and even touched on origins of usability and eye gaze simulation. Andy's a cognitive psycologist and has done huge amounts of research in web usability, I always enjoy chatting with and learning from him.

When to Use Flex + AJAX

Andrew Trice
February 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5)

Ok, this time I'm feeding off of Andre's post on Ajax And Flash Playing together. I prefer full-Flex applications, but you often come upon the scenario where this is not an option or is not cost/time effective. The purpose of this post is to highlight some scenarios & reasons where you would want to use both Flex and AJAX together, but also point out some of its limitations.

LFFS - 3: Object Oriented Language

Adam Flater & Scott Sheridan
February 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (14)

As we have previously mentioned, Flex 3 makes use of ActionScript 3.0, a powerful object-oriented programming language. Before we dive into the specific syntax used in ActionScript, let's take a look at what makes a language object-oriented in the first place, and the benefits to using and object-oriented language versus a procedural language.

tags:
lffs
oop

AIR API - Performing Updates in ActionScript

David Tucker
February 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (8)

In the last article, I examined the process for updating AIR applications. If you haven't read that article, you might want to go back and brush up on the basics. In today's article, I will specifically covering how to update an application in ActionScript (for Flex or Flash).

In this article I will also provide a sample application that illustrates the complete update process from beginning to end. I also have provided the source code for this example, so you can use portions of this in your own AIR application.

tags:
air
air api

Spry 1.6.1 - Rating Widget

Raymond Camden
February 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

In my previous post, I talked about the 1.6.1 release of Adobe Spry. Today I'm going to continue the discussion with a look at one of the new features of 1.6.1 - the Rating widget.

tags:
ajax
spry
widgets

Hello, Flex, Silverlight and JavaFX

Moxie Zhang
February 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (10)

The RIA world has been seeing intensified competition since last year's releases of Microsoft Silverlight and Sun JavaFX, which joined the Adobe Flex/AIR to become the major RIA development platforms. Even though all three of them intent to reach the the same goal, richer user experience and more creative media delivering, the technologies behind them are vast different. But how different from a RIA developer's perspective? Let's do a quick comparison by writing a small program on these three platforms.

MIT Says Offline Web Applications are in the Top 10 Technologies

Andre Charland
February 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Offline Web Applications and specifically AIR have been added to the Top 10 Technologies by MIT's Technology Review for 2008. The Technology review puts Adobe's AIR up against some other really cool technologies in their list.

Ajax and Flash Playing Together...Why Not More?

Andre Charland
February 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (6)

Andrew Trice's recent post on his very cool Flex visualization post got me thinking about using Ajax and Flash/Together. It's been possible for years, but uptake seems slow. Seems like the widget providers and video embedding sites adopted it whole heartedly, as did banner ads, but no one else is biting. So I thought I'd point a few great examples and some tools to make it easier.

tags:
ajax
flash
flex
ria

Why Mozilla Deserves Our Attention - Part 2

Ben Longoria
February 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4)

In the first part of this series I gave an introductory look at Mozilla, and started to answer the statement posed in the title. In this article we'll look at the various RIA technologies and runtimes that Mozilla has to offer. First we'll look at the building blocks, or what one would use to build applications. Then we'll look at runtimes, what you use to run your applications.

Making Things More Interactive

Andrew Trice
February 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (8)

One of the key concepts for a RIA is that it has to be rich. This could be rich content, rich interactivity, or a combination of the two. The extent of the richness of the application directly ties to an emotional response when using the application. We always want that to be a good response, otherwise that application that you spent a lot of time and effort creating will be dead before you know it.

<< 1 2 3 4 5 6 >>

Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA Part 6: The Data Project Maven Build
Tony Hillerson

Last installment we examined the Maven build lifecycle and where the tests are located in our sample application. Now, we'll look at how Maven and Ant integrate and how we'll use DBUnit and DDLUtils to build and populate the... Continue Reading
Papervision3D: Part 1- Foundation and 3D Object Basics
John Lindquist

Papervision3D Papervision3D is an open-source, MIT licensed 3D engine written in ActionScript 3.0 for Flash. This article will teach you how to set up your first Papervision3D application with the most recent revision as of this writing, Papervision3D 2.0 Alpha,... Continue Reading
Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA Part 5: Build Life Cycle
Tony Hillerson

Last installment we looked at more of Maven's project structure. Now we'll look at the Maven build lifecycle and where the tests are located in our sample application. The build life cycle that Maven defines is the set of... Continue Reading
Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA Part 4: The Three Child Projects
Tony Hillerson

Last installment we started looking at how we organized our J2EE project structure and described it with Maven. Now we'll continue looking at the project's structure. One of the locations that Maven expects to find in a project is... Continue Reading

Or, visit our complete archive.

O’Reilly: Inside RIA