O’Reilly: Inside RIA

This excerpt from Learning Flex 3 is for InsideRIA readers who may be considering giving Flex a try and who need a get-up-to-speed tutorial on handling user input in Flex. It's written by Alaric Cole, who's contributed open source components to the Flex community and who is a development and consulting specialist at Yahoo!.

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Assuming you are a Flash Developer and create websites and/or RIAs for a living (or for fun), how would you make the switch from browser to desktop development? With this guide I will lead you through this process step by step. As a sample project we will create a drag and drop mp3 player. The reason why is it encompasses most of the AIR APIs and no matter what the size, these steps can be applied to any project. Everything is done within the Flash IDE.

With LiveCycle Data Services ES 2.6 ("LCDS"), Adobe has added native caching for AIR and the Flash Player. This is an amazing advancement due to the small amount of code required to complete offline synchronization compared to a custom solution. The goal of this article is to provide a start to finish guide to building an AIR application with offline data synchronization from LCDS. I am a tactile learner and I like to write and present this way so instead of chatting...let's code!

More than a year has passed since Flash CS3 was released to widely positive reviews, but many Flash users are still frustrated by some of the workflow changes introduced by ActionScript 3.0. The truly problematic changes are relatively few, but together they have a deep effect on the typical Flash user's daily job. In the spirit of working toward solutions, and of giving a formal voice to the collective grumbling of everyday Flashers, this article provides a guide to The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0. The list of accusations follows...

The DataTable component allows us to display and manipulate tabular data. It can be used to enhance an existing HTML table, produce one based on data fetched from a remote data source in JSON, XML or CSV format or a local (client side) source in a few more formats.

Little more than a two years ago YAHOO! decided to make its library of cross-browser JavaScript components available to the public with a BSD license as the YUI, the YAHOO! User Interface library. It is now reaching the end of its second major version with dozens of minor versions, each new one bringing a few more components with it.

The following has been excerpted from Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source by Jeff Tapper, Michael Labriola and Matthew Boles with James Talbot. Copyright © 2008. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and Adobe Press. In this lesson, you will learn about both memory and performance profiling, two techniques facilitated by the new Profiler feature in Flex Builder 3 Pro. (Note: The new profiling feature is only available to users of Flex Builder 3 Pro. An evaluation version of Flex Builder 3 Pro is availabl from www.adobe.com/go/flex/. Flex Builder Standard users will not be able to access the profilerscreens.) To understand the need for this tool, you need to learn some details about how Flash Player executes code in Flex and how it allocates (gives) and frees (takes back) memory.

This installment concludes our series on Flex, LiveCycle Data Services, and EJB 3.0 by exploring the administrative section of the application, showing more managed data features, and looking at server push from JMS to Flex.

Materials
Why do you need to learn about materials in Papervision3D? Take a sphere for example: How do you determine whether the sphere is a globe, an eye, or a basketball? You only know by which material is mapped to the sphere.

This article will cover the basics of the materials available through Papervision3D and teach you how to add materials to Planes. Let's get started, we’ve got a lot of “material” to cover:

In the last installment of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA, we worked on building the Flex view. In this installment we're going to continue looking into the Flex view by examining the search tools in our application.