O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Just under a year ago the ILOG elixir team released a demo of their Flex charting components using data from the CIA world factbook. A new version of the demo was posted last Friday and looks really good. The new version expands upon the original by using PureMVC for the code, a better theme (by Juan Sanchez), and an updated UI. It also implements a few new views and adds drill down to the tree-map. It's a great example of what Flex was made for: powerful data visualizations that would be immensely difficult in traditional web languages.

LovelyCharts, the excellent Flex-based charting framework I blogged about in July of last year, is out of private beta and available to all. Head on over to the site to try it for yourself.

Sessions for the ever-popular 360|Flex conference are being chosen a little different this year. You-the-attendees, or at least you-the-internet, has the opportunity to weigh in and vote for the sessions you think sound the best. Conference organizers John Wilker and Tom Ortega will still have the final say in picking the sessions, but hopefully the voice of the people will be heard.Click here for a full list all of the sessions eligible for voting.

The recorded MAX 2008 North America sessions are up and online at Adobe Groups. Unfortunately, the videos can't be embedded (as far as I can tell), and only members of the group can view the videos. Fortunately, everyone's eligible for membership.

The real problem with mobile development is that you need to learn a new language. Every platform currently has their own unique language for writing applications, and some of them are downright obtuse (I'm talking to you, Objective-C for iPhone.) With the number of mobile devices and mobile internet connections exponentially rising, it was only a number of time before someone made it easier. Enter PhoneGap.

If you've been hiding under a rock for the last year or so, Ribbit is a platform for voice - a strong platform that allows developers to manage and process voice content in ways we couldn't before. Ribbit is well positioned to radically change the way we view voice communication, and if you're a developer you should probably dig into it. Besides learning a great technology, there's $100,000 in it for you if you can make something good. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

If you're like me, you've been hearing a lot about this amazing thing called User Experience. It's supposed to turn your normal, old, web 1.0 piece-of-garbage application into a shining beacon of hope in a world beleaguered by bad interfaces. If you're like me, you've been watching the explosion of User Experience from somewhere between the forefront and the sidelines, enjoying the arrival of the requisite acronyms (UX, XD, EX, UXD, etc.), and trying to figure out exactly where and what the forefront even is. If you're like me, you've been a little skeptical of this vague and magical term for a while now, and if you're anything at all like me, you've been wanting someone to clear things up.

If you missed my post last week, Rombla is a powerful WYSIWYG editor for Flash content. Built entirely in Flex, the application serves as both a powerful design tool and CMS. Rombla was built by Piria, a software company based in Louisville, Colorado. I recently caught up with Piria CEO Bob Lang. Bob was kind enough to agree to an interview about Rombla, and gave me some great insights into how they built such an excellent application in such a short time.

Today Herff Jones announced the launch of a robust new RIA for creating and editing yearbooks online. The application is called eDesign, and it lets teachers and students collaborate in real time through a fully functional and very powerful layout and content creation tool. I took eDesign for a test drive recently and was really impressed by the sheer number of usable features the team was able to implement - imagine Adobe InDesign done specifically for yearbooks. In this entry I'll take you through the wide range of features eDesign has to offer.

In case you missed all the adjectives in the title, Rombla is a powerful online WYSIWYG flash-site building RIA. Created and hosted by the folks at Piria, the app is geared towards bridging the gap between web designers and their clients. In this entry, I'll talk about how Rombla works, some of it's cooler features, and give screen shots and links to a site I made with it.