O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Yep, thats right... Google has released a Flash/AS3 API for Google Maps, and yes, it works with Flex. I'm very glad to see the Google Maps team take this step, and provide a supported API for their maps interface.

The best way to learn Flex is to get in there, and to start working with it. However, there are things you might not pick up on on your own. One of the best ways to get to know the inner workings of the Flex framework, and to learn how others do it. Now, where can you look to see how others have done things? Here are a few ideas...

Last week Ubuntu 8.04 was released, and I have got to say, I am impressed. Of course, once the OS was installed, my next logical step was to get Flex Builder for Linux working on it. Here's a step-by-step guide to what I did to get Flex Builder working on there.

I've discussed graphics filters previously, and here's a trick to use them to extend the capabilities of basic Flex controls. In this example, graphics filters will be used to alter the appearance of a basic tree control. I've run into this scenario numerous times... How can you change the appearance of tree folder icons to imply meaning to the branches of the tree?

I am thoroughly impressed with some of the things that I have seen recently coming out of the 3D flash world. PaperVision3D has come a long, Away3d is looking great, and today was the first time that I have ever seen the Alternativa Platform. I'm speechless by some of the work that I have seen.

Here's a quick tip to help you squeeze extra performance out of your Flex/ActionScript applications when looping over and crunching lots of data on the client side. Use the dictionary class or associative arrays when you can!

Today, Adobe released the public beta version of LCDS 2.6 on labs. I see this as a pretty big release because we now have highly scalable streaming data available over port 80 using the HTTP protocol.

Adobe recently released the first public alpha version of the AIR runtime for Linux on labs. This is great news! I felt compelled to "geek out" with it, and was able to get AIR running on an Asus EeePC, although with a few minor issues.

I've expanded upon the ideas of my last post: "Degrafa + Datagrids = Visual Display of Data", and I'm continuing to explore data visualizations using Degrafa. This time, I've decided to tackle the sparkline.

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.