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.

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.

 

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...

Ted Patrick has a post up on his blog about a new feature in Flex 4 that will allow for state-specific variables to be nested in individual components. Ted claims that in Flex 3 and below, States have been too hard to use and edit outside of the "design view" (someone uses the design view?), so an effort has been made to simplify them. In this entry I'll discuss his solution and provide an alternative way to handle states.

One of the most important aspects of delivering a rich user experience is what a user sees and interacts with on the screen. Graphics, whether static or dynamic, comprise the face of an application. Static graphics can definitely suffice for creating the necessary visual parts of an application, but to change them you must replace them with other static graphics. Dynamic graphics, created with programmatic drawing are very powerful because it can be manipulated at run-time, but it can involve more advanced knowledge of the Drawing API. Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework that aims to offer the best of both worlds.

In the last installment of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA, we looked at the Cairngorm command. In this installment we're going to have a look at the model locator. Follow along with each stage of development, every Monday on InsideRIA.com.

In our last installment, we briefly introduced the MXML language. We learned that all MXML tags are used as a sort of "short hand" representation of ActionScript code in Flex applications. This time, we continue to look at MXML and it's role as a helpful tool within the Flex programming environment.

All of the material in this article involving code, and indeed all code examples so far in the series, have been written using Flex Builder 3.0. It's worth noting that although we haven't yet devoted an entire installment to the use of Flex Builder, (we will very soon), those new to Flex and wishing to learn more should definitely head straight to the Adobe product downloads page and grab their free 60 day trial. Flex Builder is as good as it gets as far as I. D. E. s are concerned, and a great way to learn programming is to start messing around with code to try to get things to happen. On that note, we've included a sample application for you to experiment with, but more on that later.

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.