O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Flex Based Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) by definition typically require server access to provide the information resources and repository. When jumping into the server side topics, are you confused and overwhelmed by the choice of server platforms, networking protocols, and messaging formats such as REST (XML), SOAP, and Adobe’s AMF? In this article I work to alleviate those fears and confusions about remote servers and messaging with the Flex client. This article provides a review of these alternatives along with an analysis of example remote messaging code utilizing the AMF 3 protocol.

In this week's installment of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA we're going to start looking at the Flex service layer of our application, and be introduced to Cairngorm, the Flex micro-architecture that helps simplifiy the complexity of building user interfaces in Flex.

Last time we looked at testing the Java part of the application so far. In this section of the series from Tony Hillerson's Enterprise Application Development with Flex, we'll look at Maven building our service layer, and be introduced to the powerful LiveCycle Data Services assemblers, which deal with the managed data flowing in and out of Flex. Follow along every Monday with our project!

This excerpt is the second part of Chapter 8 of the upcoming (March 17, 2008 - NOW SHIPPING) book titled Beginning AIR: Building Applications for the Adobe Integrated Runtime ISBN: 0470229047. Beginning AIR is written in a walk through style where the examples are built upon throughout each section of the book. The easiest way to learn how to use the API's covered is to create the examples and follow along as they are built upon. This excerpt covers the differences between asynchronous and synchronous calls to the File classes methods. It will also show how to create temporary directories and files.

Last installment we looked at the interfaces for the service layer of our application. In Part 11 of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA, we'll look at using TestNG, a Java test framework, to test our application so far. This feature is packed with code samples! Every Monday we bring you another installment in the series.

This excerpt is the second part of Chapter 8 of the upcoming (March 17, 2008 - NOW SHIPPING) book titled Beginning AIR: Building Applications for the Adobe Integrated Runtime ISBN: 0470229047. Beginning AIR is written in a walk through style where the examples are built upon throughout each section of the book. The easiest way to learn how to use the API's covered is to create the examples and follow along as they are built upon. This excerpt covers how to use the File class to create, move, copy, and delete files. It will also demonstrate the usage of the FileStream class for working with the contents of individual files.

Last week we looked at the Actionscript and Java code for the persistent entities in our application. In this week’s installment of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA, we're going to look at the Java code for the service layer in our application and introduce the concept of the session bean from EJB 3.0. Follow along every Monday with our development tutorial.

In the last installment we looked at our development lifecycle and the dependencies of our persistence layer. Now we're going to look at the actual code that makes up the persistence layer, Actionscript and Java. Follow along at each stage of development, every Monday on InsideRIA.com.

It seems that the number one request I get for development work is creating applications that do image manipulation or vector drawing or a combination of the two. This article is about my experiences in building applications in Flex to manipulate images. It will cover the basics of loading an image, saving a reference to it, adjusting color, applying pixel effects, changing its dimensions and orientation and ultimately saving these changes. The aim of this article is not to provide production ready solutions but instead to provide ideas for implementing image manipulation solutions in Flex.

This excerpt is the first part of Chapter 8 of the upcoming (March 17, 2008) book titled Beginning AIR: Building Applications for the Adobe Integrated Runtime ISBN: 0470229047. Beginning AIR is written in a walk through style where the examples are built upon throughout each section of the book. The easiest way to learn how to use the API's covered is to create the examples and follow along as they are built upon. This excerpt covers how to create, move, copy, delete, and list the contents of directories on the operating system's file system.