O’Reilly: Inside RIA

This was my second MAX and, let me tell you, I enjoyed it a lot more than the last year’s one. This was an intriguing event with lots of interesting news, and promises of new releases. Among the announcements, news about upcoming developments for Flash Player 10.1, Flex 4, LCDS, Air 2.0, and Flash Catalyst.

Recently, I decided to get my hands dirty with the latest build of Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4. The new IDE has a lot of really exciting new features that will save developers a lot of time. The features that excite me the most are the new Spark components and skinning capabilities in the new SDK. Towards the beginning of the year I had read through the first few drafts of the new Spark component architecture, the style changes and how easy it is to skin components. Lots of things have changed since then, so I decided to refresh my memory and build a simple component to test my knowledge. Behold the SortableList component.

In the spirit of tonight's first NFL game of the season, I decided to put together an example that integrates feeds from NFL.com and brings it directly to your desktop. This is a basic example that demonstrates how to use Flash Builder's data wizards to consume data from a public rss feed as a HTTPService.

One of the new components that I am a fan of in Flex 4 is the DataGroup. "Why?" you may wonder... Well, the DataGroup is essentially the "repeater done right" (not my words, but I'll repeat them). The DataGroup allows you to easily create sets of objects based on the contents of a collection (ArrayCollection, XMLListCollection, or any other ICollectionView implementation), and even support virtualized data layouts.

I am thrilled that there is some built-in code formatting in Flash Builder (the next, renamed version of Flex Builder) even if it is only code indenting. Especially because some of my coworkers and I disagree on correct indentation,...

Picking up where my last post about Spark skins left off, this post will show you how to add transitions to the skin of our previously created button.

This episode we get a chance to chat with Simeon Bateman and pick his brain on his recent projects. We discussed continuous integration servers, the name space change in Flex 4, and the open source nature of Adobe Flex.

One of the new features in Flex 4 is Spark skins. The spark.skins package is part of the Spark namespace and, as noted in Adobe's Flex 4 LiveDocs, "Custom Spark skins are MXML files that define the logic, graphic elements, and other objects that make up a skin for a Spark component." So what does that mean to you? I hope to get you started in learning the answer to that question in this post.

A few weeks ago I gave a talk with Andy McIntosh at Adobe Camp Denver on some of the new features in Flex 4. The conference was fantastic. I've embedded the slides and links to our examples in this entry. Enjoy!

Connecting to data with Flex 4 and Flash Builder is now easier than ever. In this post, we'll walk through a simple scenario that will connect a Flex application to a web service, and we will barely write any code.

If you haven't been keeping up with the latest on Flex 4, this is something that you will certainly want to look into. One of the new features of the Flex 4/Spark component architecture is that you can customize the layout of a container without altering the container itself. All you need to do is define a custom layout. Read more to see how...

I was experimenting with Flex 4 this evening, and I realized something -- Incorporating video in your application is now really, really, really easy. Don't believe me, read on...

I typically don't post about other people's posts, but I felt it necessary in this case. Mike Chambers has compiled a ton of useful information on Flex 4/Gumbo. It's definitely worth checking out.

Ted Patrick just posted a screencast from Mark Anders where he gives a great overview of the roadmap for Flex 4 aka Gumbo , Flash Player 10, Degrafa and Thermo at 360 Flex.

The Flex 4 SDK, code named Gumbo, is up for download now. This is an exciting time for Flex, it's now 2 full versions beyond Flex 2 which was really the first version of Flex that gained mainstream adoption. Adobe is really working hard to get ready for the release of Flash 10 and Thermo.