O’Reilly: Inside RIA

This is really a two-part question. Part 1: Are low-cost, low-power, ultra-mobile computers the next big thing? Part 2: Will RIA applications play a role in this trend?

I've been looking for additional detail on Deep Zoom, a new Silverlight feature and the subject of one of the coolest demos shown in the MIX08 keynote: Hard Rock Memorabilia 2.0, a photo montage of rock and roll items found at Hard Rock restaurants, hotels and casinos around the world. The Memorabilia page presents 258 items -- instruments, letters, wardrobe pieces, public records and more -- which you can then zoom in on...

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.

John Osborn, Senior Editor, .NET and Windows for O'Reilly Media blogs talking points from Microsoft MIX08. What's the case for Mono, Novell's open source implementation of the .NET Framework? I was surprised by the answers I heard from Joseph Hill, Mono product manager at Novell, in the course of a conversation at the TAO Beach in Las Vegas on Wednesday evening.

Aviary (a.viary.com) has generated quite a bit of buzz lately, and it has certainly been warranted. There are several reasons why a complete Flex based online creative suite of applications is revolutionary, so I wanted to find out a bit more about where these applications were heading. On Monday I had a chance to talk with a member of the Aviary team, Avi Muchnick, about their applications as well as the future of software delivery. His thoughts echoed many of my own, but it was amazing to see how their product demonstrates many of the features that I thought existed only in the future. Aviary currently has two products in semi-public beta: Phoenix (image editor) and Peacock (pattern generator).

The responsiveness and performance of a Flex application directly relates to what is being displayed onscreen. The more that is happening, the slower the application will respond. In most cases, you won't run into this scenario. If you are dynamically adding LOTS of UIComponents, then this tip will help you create applications that perform very well under heavy load.

Dion's at Mix and has just posted the scoop on IE 8. And it sounds like there are significant new features and improvements as detailed in the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit. We got lots of goodies including better security, improved back button support, lightweight offline access, new developer tools and a whole lot more! You should be able to download IE 8 here, but the link isn't working yet.

In the previous two articles we looked at who Mozilla is, what technologies they have, and attempted to answer the statement in the title. To be well-rounded, we will look at some core issues that may be hampering adoption of Mozilla technologies, and what could help.

Let me start off by saying that I am - in no way - a usability expert. I hardly even consider myself an Ajax expert. But I've built enough Ajax applications now where I'm beginning to think more and more about the usability aspects of the site. I recently had an opportunity to make improvements to one of my sites based on user feedback, and I thought I'd share what I did and get people's opinions about how I could have done it better.

A few weeks back Ext JS announced that they would soon be supporting the AIR API's. They worked with Adobe to allow Ext 2.0.2 to run within the AIR 1.0 application sandbox. One of the coolest new applications using this new library is called Simple Tasks v2 created by Jack Slocum. Simple Tasks v2 utilizes the Ext.air package to make calls to the AIR APIs. This new Ext package simplifies the use of the AIR APIs within HTML/JavaScript application as calling the AIR APIs natively is somewhat pain full.