O’Reilly: Inside RIA

In this tutorial we start to work with REST and Flex, are you asking what is and why use REST? REST is acronym for REpresentational State Transfer and it helps you to provide services to communicate with your database via XML but not only. With REST you can work in large web application until to small RIA, in fact is a scalable system that make all communication easier. Before starting with this tutorial you must download and configure your computer to work with Rails and Flex 4, instructions included. Follow along step by step to create an address book with REST and Flex.

Last November, Rich Tretola asked InsideRIA readers what topics they'd like the InsideRIA bloggers to cover. One of the answers that intrigued me was by a commenter who was looking for advice on how to make the transition from...

This is very cool. The jQuery team has announced some pretty big news today. As they get closer to the final 1.4 release, they have launched a new site called 14 Days of jQuery. Every day, for 14 days, new...

This evening, I stumbled across a great example of some new animation effects possibilities in Flex 4, based on AnimateTransitionShader and PixelBender (pixel shader) effects. I normally try not to just refer to someone else's code example, but these are too cool to not share...

When I transitioned from artist to developer, once I learned Flash I didn't go any further. Sure I know PHP, Ruby, JavaScript and a few other languages but not as well as I know ActionScript. Where am I going with this? Well, when I was an artist I picked the right tool for the job, but as a programmer I locked myself into one language and made that my focus. In 2010 my New Year resolution and life goal is to become a Renaissance Developer just like I was as an artist. Here, in no particular order is my list of the languages I want to learn in 2010: Silverlight, Unity, HaXe, Object C. I would love to hear your thoughts and if you want to also become a Renaissance Developer?

It's no secret that I was really inspired by RIAdventure - I've been to and spoken at many conferences, but this was the first I had been to that was devoted to RIA's. One thing that was kind of nice and kind of odd was that I had the womens' bathroom to myself. This was nice, because the bathroom closest to our conference room had only one stall, but it underlined that I was the only woman there. This made me really curious about what other women might have been there had I been at a different conference. It's kind of difficult to find out much about conference attendees, so I thought I'd look at the women who have been speaking at recent conferences or are scheduled to speak in the next few months. Some of these women are ones I've known for a while, and others I discovered by going on this search.

In my last article I talked about growing the skill of time estimation, and the different levels there are to the skill. In this article I'm going to discuss the different types of estimates you can provide. It's important to be explicit in the type of estimate you are providing, and to make sure your audience understands the type of estimate that they are receiving. For instance, there's SWAG. A swag is a Stupid Wild Ass Guess. I've also heard the first S sometimes stand for super, or scientific or sophisticated. It's not to create a timeline from. It's not to set expectations, its simply to give a rough idea of how long something or a piece of something might take.

Type casting and type checking have always been central to any computer programming language, especially in Object Oriented languages like Actionscript. In fact, knowing what type of object you are receiving as a parameter or the ability to "transform" your...

Estimating your time One of the soft skills you'll acquire as you progress in your career is a sense of how long it takes you to do certain tasks. You'll often be asked by your manager to come up with...

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 - As3 Design Patterns On The iPhone....