O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Elad Elrom is a technical writer, technical lead, and senior Flash engineer. As a technical writer, Elad wrote books covering Flash technologies. He maintains an active blog and has spoken at several conferences regarding the Flash platform. He has helped companies follow the XP and Scrum methodologies to implement popular frameworks, optimize and automate built processors and code review, and follow best practices. Elad has consulted a variety of clients in different fields and sizes, from large corporations such as Viacom, NBC Universal, and Weight Watchers to startups such as MotionBox.com and KickApps.com.

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - Using IntelliJ Idea 9 For Flash...

Last November, Rich Tretola asked InsideRIA readers what topics they'd like the InsideRIA bloggers to cover. One of the answers that intrigued me was by a commenter who was looking for advice on how to make the transition from...

When I transitioned from artist to developer, once I learned Flash I didn't go any further. Sure I know PHP, Ruby, JavaScript and a few other languages but not as well as I know ActionScript. Where am I going with this? Well, when I was an artist I picked the right tool for the job, but as a programmer I locked myself into one language and made that my focus. In 2010 my New Year resolution and life goal is to become a Renaissance Developer just like I was as an artist. Here, in no particular order is my list of the languages I want to learn in 2010: Silverlight, Unity, HaXe, Object C. I would love to hear your thoughts and if you want to also become a Renaissance Developer?

Flash and the City is a little less than 6 months away, but preparations are being made around the clock to ensure it will be the premier Flash conference in 2010. The conference's main organizer, Elad Elrom, along with...

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - Flash TDD Project Template. Those of...

There are about 250K developers working with Flex and AIR. If you add an army of ActionScript developers, this number will grow substantially. Where do you go if you have a technical issue while developing RIA? As of today, there...

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.

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - URI Manager Utility. In the past I have talked about using RegEx to create a utility for replacing tokens in a string. My uri manager utility follows the same concept but helps you organize all of your URIs in a external file. Not only that but when you request them when, you can customize their values on the fly. Whether you are keeping track of 1 or 100+ URIs this simple utility will help make your life way easier.

Last week, I wrote about the Lazy Loading design pattern. There's not much written about its opposite, Eager Loading, in ActionScript 3. The reason for this is simple–true eager loading can't be done in AS3 itself, it has to be...

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over 5 Tips for Unit Testing. Unit Testing and Test Driven Development are a hot topics in the Flash community lately, especially on Twitter. A few weeks ago, after realizing how complex my F*CSS library was getting, I decided to go back and write FlexUnit test for the library in a hope to use TDD moving forward.

Wikipedia defines Lazy Loading as "a design pattern commonly used in computer programming to defer initialization of an object until the point at which it is needed." Typically, we do this to make an RIA application more responsive–since we're not...

Mike Downey joins us to discuss the competition between Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash. Prior to working for Microsoft as a Silverlight Evangelist he worked for Adobe for 9 years with the Flash Platform. Joining us on the panel...

I've spent a few years studying the behavioral pattern associated with ubiquity, and I'm surprised at what I've learned along the way. Here right now, I'm going to unload my findings, and it's up to you to keep an open mind about it all and take a deep breath about the subject. Ubiquity is only important to you, the one in the "doing" seat (developing/designing). Ubiquity isn't important as much as the reasons why people will use a given technology in the first place. Ubiquity is simply a scorecard to track whether or not people are choosing NOT to install a plug-in.

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. Each AFT is designed to be quickly digested, usually only taking a few minutes to get up and running, and contains valuable information you can directly apply to your next Flash campaign. In this AFT I will go over - Dynamically Creating Classes From XML.

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 have spent a lot of cycles / years nudging Apple that Flash should be on the iPhone. Apple have firmly just said no, and despite the answer, Adobe keep expecting them to cave due to public demand. The problem with this logic is that Apple won't give in. Let's break this down into two parts: First, Don't poke the sleeping giant. Secondly, just because it's easy, doesn't mean its successful.

We sat down with Chris Griffith and Kevin Schmidt to discuss the big MAX announcements and give our take on what they mean. Topics covered include: Flash for the iPhone, Flash 10.1 on mobile, TVs, and netbooks.

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...

Adobe MAX 2009 is underway and yesterday during the keynote Adobe announced Flash 10.1 for mobile phones. It's a new runtime with improved performances and memory usage with support for new mobile platforms such as the Palm Web OS and...