O’Reilly: Inside RIA

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.

 

 

Here's fun little AcitonScript-only project that takes advantage of some of the concepts I've discussed recently. This is a great project for learning the drawing API, experimenting with Flash & math-based drawing, learning ActionScript-only projects, or seeing object caching in action. This application itself doesn't have a lot of business value, but its a great example to teach these principles so that you can use them in your own applications.

Now that you've had a chance to get your feet wet with Adam and Scott's outstanding InsideRIA series on Learning Flex From Scratch (LFFS) it's time to start really thinking about optimizing your apps. Many new developer are just happy to build an application that works without thinking of the consequences of poor architecture, inefficient code, and over-zealous eye candy. Although you may be fine for a while, eventually a lack of concern for performance is going to stop you in your tracks. Thanks to Murphy's law, this inevitability will occur most often on very large or important projects, and oftentimes after they're two days away from launch.

Microsoft released Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 at MIX08 last week. Comparing to Silverlight 1.1, the 2.0 beta 1 release has significant improvements and changes. To evaluate the state of Silverlight 2.0 as a RIA development tool, I wrote a mashup...

To continue the theme of using seamless Flash/Flex/AJAX applications, here's a really simple example how you can use Flash and AJAX together seamlessly within your applications. Yes, i said Flash, not Flex. In this example I created an ultra-lightweight ActionScript-only charting project that can be used within AJAX applications.

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.

As promised, the current installment of Learning Flex From Scratch focuses on the syntax of ActionScript 3.0. We know from the previous post that an application written in an object-oriented programming language involves, by definition, the use of objects. Objects, we found out, are derived from classes, which serve as a blueprint for the object's methods and properties. This post goes into the details of creating a class in ActionScript 3.0, providing a foundation for our journey into the language. The code examples provided here are strictly theoretical, and shouldn't be thought of as a working piece of software, but rather as a starting point to illustrate some basic language concepts.

Ryan Stewart interviewed me a couple months ago about RIAs and the trends in development and design. The first question we address is how to get into RIA development. We then take a step back and take a look at issues around issues focused on the user and how usability and user experience are the most important factors when thinking about RIAs, the technology decisions will flow from there...

In this podcast I chat with Mike Potter from the Flex marketing team about marketing your Flex application, what's new in Flex 3 as well as open source as it relates to the Flex world.

At MIX08 in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced and released a couple of new products, including Beta 1 of Silverlight (and O'Reilly announced and released Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date). Silverlight, however, comes in several downloads, and it is a bit difficult to keep track of all of them, so we'll have a look at what you can and what you should download.