O’Reilly: Inside RIA

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.

Excerpted from Chapter 18 of the Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook. Mashup applications are based on the possibility of consuming remote data sources, and to create one, you need a good understanding of the APIs available. AIR offers even greater possibilities for creating mashup applications and widgets. With AIR, you can go beyond all the sandbox security of the browser and add advanced features to the application to interact with the file system or local storage with SQLite. This chapter demonstrates how to integrate the Flickr, Yahoo Maps, and Twitter web services to create desktop mashup applications with AIR.