O’Reilly: Inside RIA

So it's just 3 weeks now before the next leg of the Adobe On AIR Tour. I'll be joining up with the crew in Stockholm, Sweden June 2nd to kick off the next 6 cities we'll be visiting and speaking at. If you're interested in attending make sure to sign up now because the events are selling out fast.

Aptana announced last week they're going to help developers deploy to the cloud, starting with Joyent's hosting services. So now Aptana is helping developers write JavaScript code with their IDE, run JavaScript and on the server with Jaxxer and now deploy their app to the web with the click of a button.

RJ blogged a bit earlier, but I thought I'd share a couple of my thoughts too. We all knew this would come eventually, but now is official: Flash is more open thanks to the Open Sceen Project. Although we're not going to see the impact overnight this is going to be very important for mobile, devices and large organizations in the years to come. The one catch is we don't know the exact licensing yet.

Steve Souders the creator of YSlow has now released Cuzillion which is essentially a page load simulation tool. Very cool for figuring the best way to structure your and in which order to load assets.

Lee Brimelow an Adobe Flash evangelist just posted a video tutorial on decompiling SWFs into timeline and AS code.

I just finished uploading a new tutorial to gotoAndLearn() which shows you how to use SWF decompiling as a learning tool to see what Flash is doing behind the scenes to your timeline code. Some people think that the words ethical and decompiling have no business being used together in the same sentence but I believe otherwise. It is obvious that you should not steal assets or code directly and if you do, you will more than likely get caught and be exposed.

The updated AIR for JavaScript O'reilly book is out and it's free so download it here! Not only is it free but it's creative commons licensed which means you could modify if you felt so inclined. This is a great overview of how to use AIR with HTML and JS. If you read the earlier version from year it's important to get the new as the security model has changed since then.

I'm going to be at JavaOne May 6th-9th and CommunityOne on May 5th. This is going to be the most exciting JavaOne to date for RIA developers. There's lots of great Ajax, JavaScript and JavaFX content obviously. But there's a number or Flex sessions and at least on AIR session which includes a case study.

Ted Patrick has a nice overview of the Elixir data visualzation and charting components that iLog has been working on. They seem to be a good example of a commercial embracing Flex to create RIA components. There is some interesting chatter about paying for commercial components in the comments on Ted's blog worth checking out.

At the London stop of the OnAIR Tour Europe we got to see a presentation about Alert Thingy which has now launched. AlertThingy is a client for the new social feed aggregation service FriendFeed and it's build in AIR.

In February, 2008, Nitobi ran an online survey about web design and development tools and technologies. They reached out to web designers and developers through blogs, Facebook, discussion forums and so forth. 570 respondents participated, some highlights are here.