O’Reilly: Inside RIA

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.

In this installment of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA we're going to continue building the Flex view. We'll see more of mxml, Flex's layout language, and Flex's powerful binding framework.

The promise of JavaScript/CSS libraries like the free, BSD-licensed Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is that they make it easier to create rich interfaces in the browser. In this article, we'll explore the creation of a simple web app using YUI and look closely at the YUI paradigm.

We've already seen how to automate the Java unit tests with TestNG, and in this week’s installment of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA we're going to automate our Flex tests with Flex Unit and Maven/Ant. Join us Mondays as we finish up our series, Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA.

One of the most important aspects of delivering a rich user experience is what a user sees and interacts with on the screen. Graphics, whether static or dynamic, comprise the face of an application. Static graphics can definitely suffice for creating the necessary visual parts of an application, but to change them you must replace them with other static graphics. Dynamic graphics, created with programmatic drawing are very powerful because it can be manipulated at run-time, but it can involve more advanced knowledge of the Drawing API. Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework that aims to offer the best of both worlds.

In the last installment of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA, we looked at the Cairngorm command. In this installment we're going to have a look at the model locator. Follow along with each stage of development, every Monday on InsideRIA.com.

Join us every Monday for the latest in our follow-along-at-home development series, Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA. This week we're focusing on Cairngorm commands and controllers and where they fit in our development.

The concept of unit testing has been around for a long time as part of the traditional Waterfall model of software development. However, it has gained in popular recently as one of the main tenets of Extreme Programming. In Extreme Programming you write unit tests first and then your code. You also refactor code often as you add features. Unit tests help find errors quickly as code is refactored and can be used as part of regression testing to make sure new code has not affected existing functionality.

Last time we looked at Cairngorm and its role in our application. This installment of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA, we're going to look at Cairngorm’s business delegates and how to set up a service oriented architecture in Flex. Join us every Monday for the next installment in our series: Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA.