The Gartner RIA Report in 2010 rated 22 Ajax technologies and RIA Frameworks. They define the Ajax/RIA market as "a set of technology offerings oriented to meeting the needs of application development teams to build systems that deliver a rich...
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As a developer, have you ever been in a situation where you had a design handed to you by the designer in a file format like Photoshop or Illustrator? What was the first thing you did then? Maybe you took...
The key topic of this article is how to take advantage of the extensive server-side functionality provided by the PHP Zend Framework Web application server on the server-side side of Flex 4 client/server RIA solutions. You'll learn that bootstrap loading of Zend Framework and using selected Zend Framework components are very easy to do.
This was a big year for Flash on Mobile devices. Not only has Flash finally made its way onto Android, Android itself is taking over the mobile space in a big way. It is clear that Adobe has a vested...
Objective-C, the programming language used to create native apps for the iPhone, is not an easy language to learn. While Steve Jobs espouses how easy it is to build an iPhone App (there are, after all, over 200,000) it is still not as easy as developing a Web site (there are billions of Web sites, in comparison). But that is all changing with tools such as jqTouch.
In this 3-part series for InsideRIA I will be covering best practices, tips, tricks, and other useful information to help you create optimized Flash applications for mobile devices. In this part I will cover the following subtitles: Architecting Manipulating...
In this 3-part series for InsideRIA I will be covering best practices, tips, tricks, and other useful information to help you create optimized Flash applications for mobile devices. In this part I will cover the following subtitles: Flash Player...
Flex Builder Burrito is finally here and I know that you are chomping at the bit to start building Flex based Android applications. This tutorial will walk you through creating your first Flex Multi Screen application for Adobe AIR on...
This article will give you a great introduction on what Robert Penner’s AS3 Signals is and how you can use it to let your objects communicate more quickly and with a lot less code than you would have to write when using regular ActionScript events.
Today, there are 5 Billion people around the world using mobile phones. It is a staggering figure. No other technology is advancing at the rapid speed the mobile industry is experiencing. As a frame of reference, there are only 1.7...
Deeplinking: the ability to control the initial view of your application via the URL Analytics: collecting usage date regarding how users interact with your application. Two common misconceptions about Flash and Flex applications is that deeplinking and collecting analytics data...
Normally I wouldn’t feel so triumphant about using a simple tag, but after the odyssey of undocumented features and behaviors that I have endured, you too would shout from the rooftops. What started as a simple idea and interesting...
Both the iPhone and Android Web browsers are built using the same technology, WebKit. With this in mind, you can create Web sites optimized for WebKit that will run on both phones. The focus of this article is animation for the mobile phone. We will cover CSS3, SVG and CANVAS techniques you can use today.
Background: The Johnny Cash Project A few months ago I had the privilege of working on The Johnny Cash Project website at RadicalMedia. It was the last project I did there before going to Roundarch, and probably one of...
Flex 4 introduced new skinning architecture that includes a complete re-work of the style architecture in Flex 4 components and allow to easily changing CSS or re-skinning the components. In this article I will give you an overview of the...
Google Wave is a collaboration platform that was announced by Google last year. It is a web based platform where participants can come together and collaborate both for work and fun. The developers of Wave have kept the platform open for extension where developers can write automated robots and gadgets (similar to widgets) that can participate in a wave and add value to the collaboration. In this article we will cover how you can start developing gadgets for Google Wave using Flex as your primary development environment.
I remember the first time I heard of User Centered Design. It was around 2003, and it hit me as if the truth has been revealed to my eyes. Since that, I started to face interface design in a different way. I was a web designer, and at that time it meant I was a graphic designer using the internet as media instead of paper. And then I found myself in an UCD assignment - which ended up being much more difficult to manage than I expected.
A whole lot of people seem to be moving from web page development to building RIAs these days. But while the emergence of the new client side technologies is easy to notice, with names like Flex, Silverlight or JavaFX appearing more and more often in the context of web development, the move to RIAs also affects the server side coders.
Have you ever asked yourself "why am I playing this stupid game when I should be doing something more productive," yet you're unable to stop? If so, you've experienced behavior modification. The developer/designer may not have used it intentionally, but the effect on your behavior was the same. If developers want to control the behavior modification that takes place when a user experiences their application, they should probably understand the science behind it and learn some basic techniques to keep users happily using the application.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is a vulnerability that allows attackers to inject client-side script. XSS stands for many of the attack we see on the Web today. Attackers find some kind of a creative way to inject script into web pages, which than allow them to expose the user to many security risks
Flash Builder provides server-side remoting technology supporting ASP.Net, J2EE, HTTP/REST and SOAP Web services, PHP, BlazeDS, ColdFusion, and LiveCycle Data Services for streaming data to and from a Flex 4 client. This article exclusively covers the PHP server-side remoting technology principally with Zend's PHP ZendFramework web application server. New RIA client and PHP sever development opportunities are emerging using the newly released Flash Builder 4 (Flex 4) IDE linked the recent additions to the Zend Framework PHP Web application server for messaging via Adobe Message Format 3 (AMF 3) serial data streams.
At GoogleIO Adobe announced that Flash Player 10.1 and AIR for Android will be released for Android 2.2. However that wasn’t the only thing they announce. As of the 20th anyone can download the AIR Prerelease and begin testing...
Flash Builder 4 marks a huge step forward for the Flex framework and Flash Platform in general. But with these advances come a rather steep learning curve. Basic tasks in Flex 3, like setting the Application layout, no longer work the same in Flash Builder 4. In this article, we'll cover some of the core changes and touch on the new designer/developer workflow.
Apple’s iPhone 3.0 OS and Google’s Android run recent branches of the Open Source WebKit browser. To this end, they are able to support technologies that are only just making it to desktop browsers. In this article you can learn how you can build Web sites that target iPhone and Android Web browsers.
Moving your Flex Components from MXML to ActionScript 3 I often hear it said that all the cool kids write their Flex components using ActionScript without MXML. I’m not sure that I agree. MXML is great for layout purposes. It...
Late last year, I took it upon myself to learn Silverlight. You see, I’m both a Flex and a .NET developer, so it makes a certain sense. I’ve also spent plenty of time criticising fanboys of both genres, so here I am putting my money where my mouth is.
This is the final in a four part series. We cover databinding, dependency properties, attached properties and a few of Silverlight's standout features.
Adding rounded corners to an object in your HTML should be easy. Heck, open up Photoshop or your favorite image editor and it is easy to around rounded corners to any rectangle you create. When it comes to creating Web pages it is a different matter. Creating rounded corners to a block of text, a tab or a background is not easy. The only effective way to add a rounded corner is to create a HTML table with image files that look like corners. This is a lot of work and not very easy to update. HTML5’s update to Cascading Style Sheets, CSS3, now supports a new feature that allows you to added rounded corners to elements in your HTML. Rounded corners suddenly have never been so easy.
This is the third in a four part series on understanding Silverlight by a Flex developer. There is a big culture of misinformation in both the Flex and Silverlight camps regarding how the other gets the job done. The best way to bridge the divide is to investigate how Silverlight and XAML does the RIA thang. In this Act, we delve into styling, control templates and state management in Silverlight. All of the features we’ll cover are XAML related, and as such, can be managed completely within Blend.
This excerpt is from Flex 4 in Action, by Tariq Ahmed, Dan Orlando, John C. Bland II, and Joel Hooks. This excerpt is published with permission. Principles of User Experience Design User Experience Design, often abbreviated as UXD or...
Flash Builder 4 is the successor to Flex Builder 3. In a bold move by Adobe they are finally rebranding the IDE and by doing so they reinforce the notion that Flash encapsulates Flex and AS3 development. This was...
More frequently clients want to add social networking capability to projects. For example, using a persons Twitter or MySpace account for authentication. Or to have the application update a persons status and email a friend. All of these features are...
The concept of an item online going "viral" is one that clients, developers and advertisers alike would love to hear about a project they are working on. In the case that something does become popular, how easy would it be...
Late last year, I took it upon myself to learn Silverlight. You see, I’m both a Flex and a .NET developer, so it makes a certain sense. I’ve also spent plenty of time criticising fanboys of both genres, so here I am putting my money where my mouth is.
This is part two of a four part series. We cover graphic primitives, effects, animations and events.
Ribbit enables developers to combine the richness of voice calling with the interactivity of Web 2.0 experiences. Finally there's a technology able to record and manage voice mails directly from a web site. This great feature has millions of possible implementation scenarios, but here's just one, in my step by step tutorial.
Welcome to part 2 of my IntelliJ Idea 9 ActionScript 3/Flex workflow series. If you followed part 1 you should have a HelloWorldProject setup along with a HelloWorld module. Now it is time to learn how to compile our SWF and go over the other core features IntelliJ Idea 9 has to offer. Lets not waste any more time, here we go!
It seems to me that there is a big culture of misinformation in both the Flex and Silverlight camps regarding how the other gets the job done. I figured the best way to bridge the divide was to investigate how Silverlight, and XAML, does the RIA thang. Through this article, I will focus on Flex 4 and Silverlight 3. That is, Flex 4 Beta 2 (Gumbo), Flash Builder 4 Beta 2, Flash Catalyst Beta 2, Silverlight 3 and Blend 3.
Transition and animation control is new to Cascading Style Sheets Level 3, CSS3. With a basic understanding of CSS you can add animation to your Web site without needing to know complex JavaScript or use a jQuery library. The goal of this article is to explain how transitions and animation work in CSS3 and how you can use them to build your own animation sequences.
As far as ActionScript 3/Flex IDEs go, IntelliJ is the new kid on the block. It is cross platform, is not built on Eclipse, and has some of the best code writing/refactoring features I have ever seen. It's no surprise considering IntelliJ is one of the best Java editors around and now that it fully supports ActionScript development it is worth looking at. To help familiarize you with working in IntelliJ Idea 9 I have broken this workflow tutorial into two parts. This is part 1 which covers getting up and running, configuration, the editor itself and project organization.
This excerpt is from Chapter 4 (Spark containers, view states, effects, and styling) of Hello! Flex 4, by Peter Armstrong. This excerpt is published with permission. Session 18 - Effects and Animation - Hello! Flex 4 In this workshop...
I have been developing Adobe Flex-based RIA applications for nearly three years. My prominent need has been for capable RIA photo galleries. I observed over time that most Flex-based example photo galleries resourced photos—either locally or remotely—from photo files stashed...
Following the two articles Getting Real with LCDS 3 by Justin Shacklette, this article demonstrates the GraniteDS open-source alternative and compares the solutions from the developer point of view.
Over the last decade the HTML has been trying to be a better RIA solution. First came CSS, then came AJAX and Web 2.0; but, it is not until now with the rapid adoption of HTML5 that the lines are blurring between Adobe Flash, Microsoft SilverLight and HTML. In this article you will learn about what is being included inside the new HTML5 standard such as Canvas, Video, and dramatically improved CSS. More importantly, you will find out which Web browser you should be using to take advantage of the latest HTML5 technologies.
In this article we're going to cover an exciting, and increasingly popular way to deliver an amazing user experience, video. Few mediums can grab one's attention quicker than video. Let's face it, people on the Internet have almost no attention span -- we've even reduced our conversations to 140 character chunks -- so the faster you can grab and engage the user the better.
All of our clients have data rich applications and need equally rich data visualizations to help their end customers analyze data quickly and effectively. What makes my job really interesting is that these clients are in different industries and are using different technologies. So we have pulled together a set of 28 tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines, in Flash, Flex, Ajax or Silverlight.
All of our clients have data rich applications and need equally rich data visualizations to help their end customers analyze data quickly and effectively. What makes my job really interesting is that these clients are in different industries and are using different technologies. So we have pulled together a set of 28 tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines, in Flash, Flex, Ajax or Silverlight.
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.
In Part 1, we experienced the joy of model driven development and built a complete LCDS 3 backend using the new Modeler plugin. Amazingly, no Java was needed to create a full production-ready backend. In Part 2, we will build a complete Flex 4 frontend while exercising some of the cooler client-side LCDS 3 features along the way. And once again, I won't skimp on the details.
Enterprise RIAs are big, and not the "big-in-Japan" kind of big, but big as in I use one every day. New apps are born almost daily and buzz across the blogosphere. It's usually dashboard-this and data-viz-that, but every once in a while we get an amazing look-ma-I-made-a-heat-map. The forthcoming LCDS 3 is something different and something wonderful. To me, LCDS 3 changes the game, and I fully expect the richest of the next generation enterprise RIAs to have LCDS 3 under the hood. In this article, we will build a "real" application while exercising some of the cooler features of LCDS 3 along the way. And check this out: we won't need to write any server-side code!
Metadata has the ability to give us context to the media we are dealing with. It also makes for an interesting data source. Using the Flash Platform we can combine information all ready contained in files that you are using along with web services to create an interesting user experience. This tutorial will combine id3 metadata from your mp3's to power an Flickr image search. Our final output will be an AIR application written with Flex Builder 3.
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.