O’Reilly: Inside RIA

One of the most useful and exciting elements of the AIR API is the Update capability. This capability is further enhanced by the freedom AIR gives the developer in how to integrate this functionality. Update support within AIR is handled by the flash.desktop.Updater class (note that this is in the flash.desktop package and not flash.system from some of the earlier beta versions of AIR).

In this article I'm going to discuss ColdFusion and what it has built in to enable RIA development. I'm going to focus (mainly) on what ships with the server out of the box. I'm also curious as to what PHP and .Net ships with to help RIA developers. I'm (obviously) a CF guy and will admit I know little about PHP and .Net, so if you are a developer with RIA experience in that area, drop me a line at my blog as I'd like to follow this article up with details about those platforms.

Amazon's latest release in its arsenal of web services is SimpleDB (still in private beta). This was an obvious advance for Amazon who already has a powerhouse group of web services including Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and the Simple Queue Service (SQS). The previous services allowed a developer to store static assets, deploy virtual servers, and create a line of communications between those servers. However, there was no easy way to replicate dynamic data between the virtual servers. SimpleDB fills this void.

Just about every application at some time or another needs to launch a new window... Its easy enough to open a new window. In flex, you can just use the navigateToURL window, but that has limitations.

The "Learning Flex From Scratch" series written by Adam Flater and Scott Sheridan, aims to help not only a Flex novice, but also a programming novice jump into the world of creating Rich Internet Applications using Flex. The installments of the series will cover everything from installing the Flex Builder I.D.E., to some background information on object-oriented programming. You'll even get to learn about advanced topics like source control and design patterns (a la Cairngorm) from the perspective of a beginner.

This screencast will demonstrate how to use the Clipboard Explorer AIR application. This application can be used to experiment with Adobe AIR's clipboard support. As with all of the samples I will post here - 'View Source' is enabled and can be used by simply right clicking on the chrome of the application and selecting 'View Source'.

In the last article, I introduced the key aspects of the clipboard support within Adobe AIR. There are a few additonal functions of the Clipboard in AIR of which you can take advantage. In this article we will example deferred rendering, transfer modes, and custom clipboard data types. These additional techniques can expand your knowledge of working with the clipboard in your AIR application as well as utilizing clipboard data between multiple applications.

As a developer, I've known for some time now that my design skills are not exactly "professional level". Let me be honest - I typically walk past my wife in the morning to ensure I dressed in something that isn't too horrible. But while I may not be able to design my way out of a paper bag - I think I recognize good design. A perfect example of this came up this week. My city (Lafayette, LA), will soon be offering fiber to the home, much sooner than our local cable and phone company. (And trust me, they put up quite a fight, but that's another story.) They recently rolled out a Flash based map to show what areas would first be getting fiber service. You can see the map here.

After seeing the Oakland Crime Spotting project demo at Web Direction North last week I wanted to learn about about the various mapping tools and projects going on in the RIA space. I found some pretty handy toolkits for Flash and Ajax alike.

Whether you are using Flex, Ajax, Silverlight, JavaFx, or some other RIA technology, the basic architecture is going to be pretty similar... In most cases you will typically have have a stateful client application and a separate services layer on the backend. It is important to understand this differentiation, and to understand that this plays a huge role in how you design and build your applications.