O’Reilly: Inside RIA

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...

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.

Shaun Smith and Joel Hooks of robotlegs fame joined us to discuss the creation of the project, explain its strengths, and to mention the best way to get started working with it. We were also joined by Leif Wells...

You probably already knew that you have the ability to customize mouse cursors in Flex. Did you also know that you can make them animated and interactive, completely with ActionScript? In this post, we will have some fun exploring techniques and playing around with mouse cursors.

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...

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.

Yet again, I've been inspired by others' creations on the web. In this post, we will walk through the steps to create a custom stock comparison chart similar to the ones used in Google Finance, in Flex using a mx:DataGrid.

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...

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.

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.

The software industry has been trendy for decades. Now that the days of green screens are ancient history, and Steve Jobs has contributed black iTurtlenecks to the fashion lexicon, computer fashion is visual as well as intellectual.There are many examples...

Flex does not provide a way to temporarily disable event listeners and re-enable them later.  You may want to do this to prevent endless loops.  For example, when some code modifies the selectedIndex of a List, an event is fired. ...

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 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.

In this example, we will walk through the creation of a swipe/slide effect inspired by the transitions that you often see in touch-capable devices when you use a finger to swipe from one screen to the next. One piece of content slides off to one side, and another piece of content seamlessly slides in from the opposite side.

Last week, we talked about what delayed instantiation is in Flex and why it's used, as well as how to make sure all of the children of a Container are created before you try to address them. If you missed...

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!

The upcoming 306|Flex conference in San Jose next year will feature a plethora of InsideRIA bloggers as well as a few other big names in the industry. In the past this has been one of the best conferences for sharpening your skills and making new contacts within the Flex industry, and if the speaker list is anything to go by then San Jose 2010 will be the best 360|Flex yet. As of this morning there were only 20 early-bird price tickets left available, so if you haven't registered thenAnd make sure you get on it! Here are the top 10 presentations I'm looking forward to at 360|Flex San Jose 2010, in no particular order...

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...

Delayed Instantiation is a technique in Flex whereby children of IContainer components aren't created until the user actually needs to see them. For instance, if you know that only the top half of your component will be showing, you can take control of the creation of children added to the component through MXML and only show the ones you know they will see at first. Then, when they scroll, you could show the rest. The most familiar example of a Flex component that uses delayed instantiation is ViewStack and its subclasses, Accordion and TabNavigator.