O’Reilly: Inside RIA

It's imperative to identify what your requirements are and the number of resources that you'll need to address them. You must determine what your team needs to accomplish before you begin to assemble it, otherwise you risk redundancy, inefficiency, and slowed or stalled projects. It sounds elementary, but this step can save you a lot of headaches later on.

I use frameworks in my Flex code, and so should you. There is some debate today about whether there is any utility in using frameworks in Flex. The argument against frameworks is generally that they are unnecessary, constrain development style, and add lots of useless overheard to applications. I use frameworks in my Flex code because I want my code to be as valuable as possible, because I want to be as profitable as possible.

With the release of Flex 4, misconceptions abound regarding Flex, and there has been a general reluctance to build Flex development teams internally. These are that Flex resources are scarce, and that teams need years of experience, must be large, expensive, and comprised of all-stars. However, I've found that with a few exceptions, the opposite is generally true and that nearly any organization can afford to build an effective team. This series of articles intends to debunk mistaken notions and help organizations realize the power and accessibility of this skill set.

The goal of this article is to give you a brief overview of some of the objects from clear.swc, which is a part of the open source Clear Toolkit framework available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit. Component library clear.swc includes a number of...

Farata Systems has open sourced Clear Toolkit framework for developing enterprise Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java. The latest builds and the source code of Clear Toolkit 3.1 are located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit/ . The current documentation, demos, user...