O’Reilly: Inside RIA

According to ComputerWorld Adobe AIR is going 1.0 next month with some nice big customers validating the technology to boot! The 1.0 release of the product is always an exciting and tense time, so having a huge customer like Nasdaq betting on it day one is a huge win for the platform.

One thing that has always fascinated me with Flex/Flash is the power of native graphics APIs built into the Flash player. These graphics APIs enable dynamic charting, skinning, programmatic drawing, among countless other features, but for now I want to focus on one technique that seems strangely under-used in Flex: Graphics Masks.

I was reminded of the Web 1.0 reality when Jakob Nielsen recently published an article entitled Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous.... This provocative piece comes at the Web 2.0 age in a different way than I am used to. In the article, Nielsen covers four elements of Web 2.0: Rich Internet Applications, User-Generated Content, Mashups, and an Advertising Based Business Model. I am going to be examining his arguments around the first element, Rich Internet Applications. Fellow blogger Tony MacDonell discussed this article from a design perspective, but I wanted to look at it from a developer's perspective.

AIR applications can be built with Flex, Flash, or HTML / JavaScript, but an AIR application goes beyond these technologies. What sets an AIR application apart? AIR applications have access to so many native elements of the operating system including the local filesystem, the clipboard, the command line, and native data encryption. AIR also integrates local database functionality and service monitoring to create powerful online and offline applications. In addition, AIR applications can leverage a powerful update mechanism and browser-based installation. AIR applications also add an additional level of control to HTML content and PDF documents. This is what sets AIR applications apart form the technologies that are used to develop them. This is the AIR API.

I just read about this a few minutes ago, so forgive me if this is old news, but it looks like Aptana has launched Jaxer. In their own words, this is: Modern web sites and applications use Ajax to create engaging user experiences: the HTML and CSS are set in motion using JavaScript running in the browser and calling back the server. To achieve this, the server needs to prepare the web page appropriately, and to know what to do when the JavaScript calls it. But the server knows nothing about the HTML and CSS DOM, nor how to handle JavaScript data, and you can't code it in JavaScript...

Where do the new RIA developers, specifically the JavaScript developers, find help and learn the tools of their trade? In this entry, Raymond discusses reference sources of the past and asks readers for help finding resources for the Web 2.0 age.

Rich Internet Applications may have finally earned themselves the ubiquity it deserves since being coined by Macromedia back in 2002. My name is Jonathan Snook and these are my initial thoughts on the state of RIAs.

A big part of success as a developer is the knowledge of how to sharpen your skills. Knowing where the best resources are is half the battle. These resources can assist you as you work to sharpen your skills in Adobe AIR.

Rich Tretola, the new Community Manager for InsideRIA says hello, offers his insight on the goals and future of InsideRIA introduces the team of experts of InsideRIA, and asks for your feedback to help make InsideRIA the number one place on the Internet for Rich Internet Application resources and information.

An introduction by Andrew Trice, and a little bit about what you'll find in his blog.

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Andrew Trice, Principal Architect for Flex & AIR at Cynergy Systems. I was completely caught off guard when asked to be a part of this project, and I have to admit that I am honored and excited to be a part of it.