O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Last installment we looked at the interfaces for the service layer of our application. In Part 11 of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA, we'll look at using TestNG, a Java test framework, to test our application so far. This feature is packed with code samples! Every Monday we bring you another installment in the series.

We were all wondering when Google was going to use Gears to take Google Docs offline. Well today is the day. I'm always a little bit surprised how long it takes some companies to implement their own technologies I'm always happy when they do. For I'm generally an early adopter so I win, but more importantly those underlying technologies improve for developers and everyone else.

In the RIA world, Flex and AIR applications have really taken off. With that has come increased adoption by Fortune 500 companies and new enterprise-level apps taking advantage of the Adobe Flash platform. Application and data security should always be a concern of the Flex/AIR developer. The level of paranoia the developer should implement must be weighed against the goals of the project.

So the OnAIR Tour Europe has officially begun! I joined the crew yesterday evening in Madrid for tapas in the late afternoon. Today's event was a great kick off, we had just over 200 show up and most stayed right until the bitter end. I think everyone understood most of what we were saying, although I can't be sure I think the number of questions we received was a good indicator that people were interested in AIR, Flex, Flash and Ajax.

Adobe has launched their 1st public alpha for building AIR applications on Linux. Included in this alpha are the AIR runtime, sample applications, and the AIR SDK.

The beta version of Flex Builder 3 has been updated to beta 3 and now includes support for building AIR applications on Linux.

In the previous article, I gave an introduction to SQLite and its place inside or AIR. In this tutorial, I will be explaining the code needed to connect to and query a previously existing SQLite database. This will take two articles to accomplish this, so this article will focus on learning the basic classes and methods that you will need to know. The next tutorial will contain a sample application that implements these features.

One of the most powerful features in Adobe AIR is the native integration of SQLite that was introduced in Beta 2. Since Beta 2 it's integration has been improved, and it is now a viable local database capable of storing application data or syncing with a database server. The implementation provided with AIR is powerful and provides two distinctly different ways to access the database. There are nineteen different classes that can be used with this API, and in the next few articles I will dissect the ones that you need to know.

First of all, let me start off by saying that this is NOT another blog article in the great RIA platform debate. While I am an AJAX developer, and have been for several years now, the point of this article is not to take sides and convince you that AJAX is the best RIA tool available. Because AJAX isn't. Except when it is. You see, tools have uses, and to say that any one platform is in all ways superior is, I think, overstating things. A lot. Yes, I'm a bit biased, but not so much so that I feel the need to convince people that AJAX has no flaws. Flex and Silverlight have strengths that lay against weaknesses in AJAX, and vice versa. The question isn't “Which platform is best”, but “Which platform best fits my needs”.

There still seems to be a battle to be had about the future of computing in the browser vs. on the desktop. With a little bit of terminology change, and a slightly different perspective, it becomes clear that these two environments for running software are co-evolving, not competing for attention.

If you are a Flex developer, and you haven't checked out Degrafa yet, you should. Degrafa is an open source declarative graphics framework for Flex. It allows you to easily create complex shapes, patterns, skins, gradients, strokes, etc... without intimate knowledge of the drawing API. The framework allows you to do some really cool things, without a lot of code. Here's a quick example of what can be done with a Flex datagrid, Degrafa, and some time to kill.