O’Reilly: Inside RIA

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 February, 2008, Nitobi ran an online survey about web design and development tools and technologies. They reached out to web designers and developers through blogs, Facebook, discussion forums and so forth. 570 respondents participated, some highlights are here.

Inforworld covered the announcement of Curl's entry into the rich desktop game with the release of Nitro. It appears to be positioned as a competitor to Adobe's AIR, the key differentiator they're claiming is security and performance, but this seems hard to prove at this stage.

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!

DARE is a simple AIR server created by Ted Patrick that allows developers to re-build their AIR apps as easily as they rebuild their AJAX apps. In this entry I'll review DARE and discuss my experiences building a quick and dirty AIR application out of the InsideRIA homepage.

Let's continue our focus on the languages of Flex with a little discussion of MXML. We've learned that rich internet applications by their nature have more advanced functionality than say, a typical web page laid out with just HTML. We've also learned that the way a Flex application achieves this advanced functionality is by using ActionScript to provide the "logic" for its applications. Lucky for developers, there's a way to quickly employ the power of ActionScript to create applications that also have the look and feel of anything web based. Flex developers can use MXML.

Last week Google released a very interesting hosting environment for web developer, Google App Engine. It's a quick and easy to deploy and host your web app on Google's infrastructure. It's Python only for the time being but that will change soon enough.

Normally, when working client-side within a web application and there's a need for data exchange, it feels very natural to use JSON as a data exchange format. It's easy to take a string from the server, convert it into a JavaScript object and then access what we need out of it. But maybe there's a better way.

Web map has become an important utility of our daily life. We use it to plan a trip for directions, we use it to virtually walk around a city in 3D, we use it to find an apartment or a house from map mashup applications and so on. What if we want to ask more complicate questions to the web map, questions such as "How many Starbucks stores within 5 miles range of a dream house I can't take my eyes off, and I can drive to some of those stores in 3 minutes from the dream house?" Obviously for questions like this, merely putting markers/push-pins on the map is not enough.

In this installment of Learning Flex From Scratch, I'm going to diverge a bit

from the usual content, and devote this time to disclosing the most helpful resources I've found so far on my journey into Flex. There's a lot of information out there for those who want to learn Flex, but nonetheless it can be tricky sometimes to find that perfect resource that answers your questions.