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.

 

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.

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.

Overview   As Flex developers we strive to create user experiences that are engaging and efficient.  The mandate of this mantra requires us to take startup times into account.  When we build our applications, the last thing that we...

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.

Learn how to enhance your stand-alone installation of Flex Builder with some of your favorite features from Eclipse's Java Developers Toolkit and Web Standard Tools by dropping a few jars into your plugins directory. In this entry we'll discuss the TODO/FIXME tool, Snippets, Mylyn integration with Trac, and a fix to menu crashes in Leopard.

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.