O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Tomorrow afternoon I am going to be having a chat with a few of the guys from SlideRocket. If you aren't familiar with it - SlideRocket is a Flash/Flex based RIA that really does online presentation creation and delivery right. They are currently in private beta. Let me know if there are any questions that you would like me to ask.

In the last tutorial, I examined some additional techniques for querying an existing database. Today I want to explain how you create a database and create a table inside of that database.. If you are good with SQL and have followed along with this series, this concept will work as expected.

 

Amazon continues to tweak their webservices (S3, EC2, SimpleDB, etc...) to respond to the needs of the users. Over the last month, three major enhancements have been announced.

 

In the previous tutorial, I demonstrated how to return all of the rows of a database table and access the results within AIR. Many times you will not want to retrieve all of the rows in a table, so today I will examine some techniques for querying your tables. I will focus on two main areas: Strongly Typing Results and Parameterized Queries.

 

In the previous article, I examined the process for running a simple SELECT query on a pre-populated SQLite database in AIR. In today's example, I will actually execute a simple SELECT query and use the results to populate a data grid. I will also look at how to include a pre-populated database with an AIR application.

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.

In the previous post, I examined the process for updating AIR applications in ActionScript. This was an extension to my original post about the Updater API inside of Adobe AIR. If you are not familiar with the update functionality inside of AIR, you will probably want to read the introduction.

 

 

In Part 1, I described my interview with Avi Muchnick of the Aviary team. I also described the features in Aviary now as well as some stuff that is coming in the future. Well, to be honest, talking about it is just not enough. I t decided to do a walk through of both Phoenix and Peacock so everyone can see the power of these Flex based applications.

The three biggest names in the RIA world have to be Microsoft (with Silverlight and .NET), Adobe (with the Flash Player and ColdFusion), and Sun (with Java and JavaFX). It wouldn't be a stretch to say that a vast majority of all RIA's are powered by one of these technologies. In the past these companies and their respective products have been closed. Recently, a change in heart has begun to take shape. All three of these companies are now embracing the open source philosophy in their specific RIA strategy.