O’Reilly: Inside RIA

This is an excerpt from Designing Social Interfaces. From the creators of Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces provides you with more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, along with salient advice for many of the common challenges you'll face when starting a social website. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.

If you have had an opportunity to look at the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) you could see that there is a huge opportunity to do interesting multi-user applications without needing to write all of the server side code. However there is the challenge of how do you control who comes into your application and what they are allowed to do. In addition, keeping your application credentials safe in case your SWF file was decompiled. So as the title suggests you can use a service like Facebook to take care of the users authentication and Flash Remoting for the application authentication.

The goal of this article is to help you gain a better understanding of the Decorator design pattern. The Decorator pattern is used to attach additional responsibilities to an object at run time dynamically. Decorators provide a flexible alternative to subclassing to extend the functionality of classes in a hierarchical relationship. The Decorator design pattern utilizes an important OOP concept known as the open closed principal. This means that classes are open to extension but closed for modification. The Decorator pattern also uses the concept of composition, another very powerful OOP concept.

Adobe, a long time player in rich internet applications wants be an active participant on mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Adobe engineers put their minds together and delivered a solution to work around the problem of the iPhone browser's lack of support for Flash. If the iPhone Safari browser will not support the Flash player, let's use the Flash tools to compile a native iPhone application (ipa) which lives directly on the device. This initiative now gives the opportunity for ActionScript developers to develop applications for the wonderful iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

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.

WOW! Can you believe it?! Adobe MAX Day 1 is complete, and we have seen a ton of new and exciting announcements. It's hard to think we have more to go. Being a die-hard Flash developer, you can guess which...

The Dojo Javascript Framework is truly awesome. I'll admit, the documentation is a bit to dig through, but hopefully my experience and previous digging will be of use to you. Don't worry, the only things being thrown around in this "Dojo" are Javascript and web programming ideas you may or may not have seen before. In this article I would like to accomplish two major things: giving an introduction to the Dojo Javascript Framework and a walk-through of how I approach creating a RIA using dynamic HTML and Dojo.

If you've been following the news in the web and/or RIA industry at all lately you've undoubtedly come across two little letters, U and X. UX of course, is the abbreviation for the big trend in application development right now known as User Experience. You've worked hard to become a great developer. You've learned the best practices to write bulletproof code, you've even mastered a crazy framework. Now it's time to go to the next level, you need to create an exceptional experience that matches your solid code.

We applied two simple criteria to identify the 50 most usable RIAs: Number 1: Does it adhere to the 10 basic usability principles? Number 2:Is it really rich? Developing a product with Ajax, Flex, or Silverlight doesn't inherently make it rich. A usable RIA will embody these six principles: Make it Direct, Keep it Lightweight, Stay in the Page, Provide an Invitation, Use Transitions, React Immediately.

Flex and Force.com are a powerful combination for building data-driven web applications. As a faithful reader of InsideRIA, you're probably already aware of Flex and its leading role in the evolution of rich Internet applications, but you may be less familiar with the Force.com platform. It is, in short, the same platform that underlies the well-known salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) and salesforce automation (SFA) software. These applications "run in the cloud," hosted on servers which are secured and maintained by salesforce.com, and accessed via the web on personal computers and mobile devices.