O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Yesterday IBM announced the release of ILOG Elixir 2.5 - the first Elixir release since ILOG was acquired by IBM back in January.

This purpose of this article is to introduce developers and data visualization specialists to Axiis, which is an open source data visualization project based on Adobe Flex and Actionscript 3. While you do not have to be an expert in Flex Builder or ActionScript 3, having experience in both will make understanding this tutorial easier. Throughout the article I will assume you are comfortable with the fundamentals of building an application with Flex, and understand some of the primary language constructs embodied within ActionScript 3 and the Flex SDK, primarily MXML and Binding.

Today, SpatialKey announced a private beta. The SpatialKey team has been hard at work since InsideRIA first announced the technical preview on August 9th. This new version includes many new features and some advanced visualizations. This release demonstrates why SpatialKey is one of the most exciting RIA's I have seen recently.

One of the most common themes that I write about on this blog is data visualization, especially with Flex and AIR. This time I decided to change things up a bit and am exploring data visualization with Processing.

Back in June, Google released the Google Earth API, which is a javascript-enabled browser plugin version of Google Earth. I finally got a chance to explore the Google Earth API, and here's the result.

The Java processing language is great for creating data visualizations and so is Curl. See the data visualizations written in the Java precessing language and compare them to similar programs written Curl.

Sorry, no code in this post. I decided to venture further from Flex development for a brief moment, and will focus on data and how it can be represented visually. My last post on data visualization sparked a desire to search the web to see what kinds of visualizations are out there.

I was checking out the PaperVision3D blog today, and stumbled across a really impressive data visualization technique used by the band Radiohead with the release of their new video for "House of Cards". Why is this on insideria.com, you may wonder? Read on to see...

Continuing on with my recent trend of posts related to data visualization and web based mapping, this time I've decided to have some fun and combine the two with the visualization of geographic data.

I haven't touched PaperVision3D in a while, and some of the recent articles here on insideria.com motivated me to dive in and take a look around. Here's what I came up with after sitting down with it for an evening...

I've discussed graphics filters previously, and here's a trick to use them to extend the capabilities of basic Flex controls. In this example, graphics filters will be used to alter the appearance of a basic tree control. I've run into this scenario numerous times... How can you change the appearance of tree folder icons to imply meaning to the branches of the tree?

I've expanded upon the ideas of my last post: "Degrafa + Datagrids = Visual Display of Data", and I'm continuing to explore data visualizations using Degrafa. This time, I've decided to tackle the sparkline.

If you are a Flex developer, and you haven't checked out Degrafa yet, you should. Degrafa is an open source declarative graphics framework for Flex. It allows you to easily create complex shapes, patterns, skins, gradients, strokes, etc... without intimate knowledge of the drawing API. The framework allows you to do some really cool things, without a lot of code. Here's a quick example of what can be done with a Flex datagrid, Degrafa, and some time to kill.

One of the projects that I am actively involved with at Cynergy Systems has recently gone gold, and into production. This is a brief case study how Adobe Flex was used to visualize complex data relationships for computer network topologies for ScienceLogic's EM7 Network Management appliance

Last week I was fortunate enough to have been given a demo and walkthrough of a new Discovery Channel Rich Internet Application built by EffectiveUI. The demo was given by Randy Reiland, (senior vice president, Digital Media, Discovery Communications), Anthony Franco (president, EffectiveUI), and RJ Owen (senior designer, EffectiveUI).

I just saw the new Google Data Visualization Gadgets over on Infostehtics, apparently they have a whole bunch of other charts too. Sounds like they're pretty easy to use. I think this is definitely just the beginning of trend in easy to use, but rather specific, RIA mashup UIs.