O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Another week has passed in the RIA community, and with it - a lot of news. I will cover items such as the launch of Lively, the future of Facebook as an RIA platform, Silverlight and Flash video codecs, and a lot more. Also, this week you now have the ability to submit items to be considered for the Weekly RIA Round-Up.

Last month while on the On AIR Tour in Europe, Dion managed do a quick video chat in Munich. In this interview Dion and I chat about the new things happening in App Engine including opening it up and pricing. The Dion tells us about Google has started hosting the JavaScript files for certain Ajax libraries.

The internet is a great place, but it has two drawbacks. You can’t access it everywhere, and sometimes sites and services go down. Modern web-enabled applications need to expect lapses in network connectivity. So it is not a surprise that the ability to gracefully handle sometimes-connectedness is one of the most heralded features of AIR.

I started exploring AIR’s network detection classes while co-writing Adobe AIR in Action, and was reminded that a lot of neat communication can happen over sockets.

Today starts what will be a weekly column here at InsideRIA.com. I will be examining all of the blog posts that I read over the week - and bringing out the highlights in all of the different RIA communities. Obviously, I won't be able to highlight everything - so, we will also be creating a way for you (the community) to get involved and send me information on news items in the RIA field.

I have no doubt that nearly everyone is familiar with the phrase "the right tool for the job" when it applies to construction. Well, that same adage applies directly to computer software and especially RIAs.

ILOG has launched a preview program for version 2.0 of their popular Elixir toolset. Whether you've been a fan of Elixir or you're a flex n00b looking for some sweet charting components, this program is for you. Elixir also has some new lower price points for developers who don't work for big companies with big budgets.

Lovely Charts is an application built in Adobe Flex for diagramming wire frames, interaction diagrams, UML, and just about anything else you can think of. It's one of the best and most complete user experiences I've seen in Flex, a close second to Buzzword, and really show cases the power of Flex. I had the opportunity to exchange a few emails with Lovely Charts creator Jérôme Cordiez and learned some fascinating things about Lovely Charts. Jérôme shared with me a little more about the vision and process he followed to build Lovely Charts, and why Flex was a necessary technology in that process

The past few months have brought about a lot of debate in the ColdFusion community, and I have been listening. Why? Well, I knew that I was going to need to deploy a CFML server for a project. The recent announcements meant that I needed to reconsider all of the CFML options: Adobe ColdFusion, Railo, Open BlueDragon, and Smith.

Adobe announced this evening that they're working with Yahoo and Google to make Flash content more searchable. Both companies have been given a special version of the flash player that can crawl swfs and automatically perform every action a user might, from clicking buttons to entering text in text areas to dragging and moving interactive controls.

In April I covered a simple scheduling RIA called When Is Good. I got really excited about the simplicity with which they approach scheduling a meeting - everyone gets online, clicks a single url, selects the times they're available, and the organizer gets a simple view of what time works for everyone. There's no login and no mess - just a very simple UI that everyone understands. Since that posting the application has gone through a slight overhaul. It was originally a Flex app and has now been ported to HTML, with a few feature enhancements baked in. I spoke with one of the developers about the decision to port the application to HTML.