O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Let me start off by saying that I am - in no way - a usability expert. I hardly even consider myself an Ajax expert. But I've built enough Ajax applications now where I'm beginning to think more and more about the usability aspects of the site. I recently had an opportunity to make improvements to one of my sites based on user feedback, and I thought I'd share what I did and get people's opinions about how I could have done it better.

In my previous post, I talked about the 1.6.1 release of Adobe Spry. Today I'm going to continue the discussion with a look at one of the new features of 1.6.1 - the Rating widget.

A few days ago I mentioned that a new release from the Adobe Spry was on the way, and today it landed. Version 1.6.1 is branded as an AIR update, and many of the updates are directly in relation to support for running with AIR, but some pretty darn cool features were added to this release as well. This week I'm going to discuss these changes and show some examples.

I'm a bit late in reporting this, but the Spry team blogged about their upcoming 1.7 release of Spry. I'm a huge fan of this Ajax framework, and it looks like some exciting new features are on the way.

In my last post, I discussed how ColdFusion aids RIA developers, both Flash/Flex as well as AJAX developers. I focused on serving data up to RIA consumers. In this entry, I'm going to discuss other Ajax features, most of which help out on the front end of your web site, an area ColdFusion has traditionally stayed away from (which makes sense as a back-end development platform).

In this article I'm going to discuss ColdFusion and what it has built in to enable RIA development. I'm going to focus (mainly) on what ships with the server out of the box. I'm also curious as to what PHP and .Net ships with to help RIA developers. I'm (obviously) a CF guy and will admit I know little about PHP and .Net, so if you are a developer with RIA experience in that area, drop me a line at my blog as I'd like to follow this article up with details about those platforms.

As a developer, I've known for some time now that my design skills are not exactly "professional level". Let me be honest - I typically walk past my wife in the morning to ensure I dressed in something that isn't too horrible. But while I may not be able to design my way out of a paper bag - I think I recognize good design. A perfect example of this came up this week. My city (Lafayette, LA), will soon be offering fiber to the home, much sooner than our local cable and phone company. (And trust me, they put up quite a fight, but that's another story.) They recently rolled out a Flash based map to show what areas would first be getting fiber service. You can see the map here.

So continuing on with my discussion with Jaxer, the new product from Aptana, today I got my hands a bit dirty with the code. I've complained previously about the lack of documentation, so please bear in mind that any code sample I show will probably not be 'best practice' - but since there isn't any best practices doc, I can't be wrong, right? (Of course, by the time I post this, I bet there will be one.)

Late last week I discussed the launch of Jaxer by Aptana. Jaxer's idea is simple. Take the same JavaScript knowledge you use in building rich internet applications and apply them to the server side as well. I've taken some time to play more with Jaxer and I'd like to show some of what I've learned so far.

I just read about this a few minutes ago, so forgive me if this is old news, but it looks like Aptana has launched Jaxer. In their own words, this is: Modern web sites and applications use Ajax to create engaging user experiences: the HTML and CSS are set in motion using JavaScript running in the browser and calling back the server. To achieve this, the server needs to prepare the web page appropriately, and to know what to do when the JavaScript calls it. But the server knows nothing about the HTML and CSS DOM, nor how to handle JavaScript data, and you can't code it in JavaScript...