O’Reilly: Inside RIA

In this new InsideRIA series I will be covering specific security vulnerabilities, showing examples of how an attacker can abuse Flash/Flex applications, and pointing out ways to help prevent these attacks. The purpose of these articles is to increase awareness so you will take security into consideration when building your applications. In part one we'll examine cross-domain scripting vulnerability.

Adobe just released public information about AIR 2.0 and added new capabilities that better tie with the operation systems which gives your application more control while increasing performance. The new version will be deployed on Flash player 10 using Flex 4 SDK. The new features can be split into four main categories: new functionality, additional functionality to existing APIs, platform awareness related to APIs and finally, optimization.

Designer-developer workflow (D-D workflow) in conjunction with Rich Internet Applications (RIA) has become one of the most talked about buzzword in the Flash community in the last few years. It created a lot of debate and uncertainty on how designers and developers were going to work together. Now that Adobe Catalyst is public (since the release at the Adobe Max conference last year), and that we have had a chance to play around with the tool, I believe it’s time to open a discussion on how the direction the D-D workflow should be heading based on my experience. In this article I will talk about how Flash Catalyst (FC) should be used to allow designers and developers to work together.

Flash Text Layout Framework (TLF) Created by the InDesign team (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/textlayout/), TLF is Adobe’s new Flash framework for dealing with text. The TLF can be used in Flash CS4, Flex 3.2 and Flex 4 SDK The new framework consists of...

We don’t need to be jealous of Java developers anymore. The new version of FlexUnit 4 just got closer in similarity to the JUnit (http://www.junit.org/) project and supports many of the features JUnit has, and more! FlexUnit4 combines features from...

The video player ecosystem is complex. I pointed out the complexity of creating a video player in my last post about OVP, however, it doesn’t end there. In addition to the complexity of creating a video player there are other elements that make a video player a complete composition, such as advertisement elements, social network elements, reporting, content management, DRM etc. Adobe recently announced of creating new framework called Adobe Strobe that is aimed at solving these issues.

Akamai has started an open source project called the Open Video Player (OVP) that is an open source video player that address many of the challenges involved in building a high quality video player.