O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Hamcrest? No, it isn't a fancy sandwich topping. Hamcrest is a framework for creating matchers, allowing matching rules to be defined declaratively (from Wikipedia). Hamcrest has been used by many popular unit testing frameworks including JUnit and FlexUnit 4. Hamcrest-AS3...

Now that we have a client built that will send and receive packets we need a server for it to communicate with. Lets walk through a quick implementation of a basic Java UDP socket server. Some familiarity with Java is...

So now that we understand the usage of UDP lets jump right into building a basic UDP client and server. We'll use the DatagramSocket class to send packets to a specific port at a specific address. We'll also bind our...

Flash player has supported socket connections for some time but has lacked UDP specific support. Although there was the recent addition of RTMFP (a protocol utilizing UDP to enable low latency data transfer and P2P connections) it doesn't provide direct...

I recently came across this article comparing the implementation of a simple "slide gallery" application in Flash and Silverlight. I was inspired to try to replicate the application's behavior in Apache Pivot. The results of my efforts are in this post:

In previous articles, we finished writing most of the code of the Pac-Man game. In article 3, we implemented a simple algorithm for the ghosts to catch the Pac-Man. The ghosts randomly decides in which direction they move. They do not chase the Pac-Man even they are very close to him. This makes the game less challenging. In fact, the behavior of the ghosts are the most tricky part of the game. According to Iwatani, the author of the original arcade game, he had designed each ghost with its own distinct personality in order to keep the game from becoming too difficult or boring to play. ( More info) However, there is generally no conclusion on what behavior of the ghosts are good for the players.

In the last article, we developed a preliminary version of the Pac-Man game. Four ghosts are randomly roaming the maze and a Pac-Man character can be controlled by a player. Now, we write some more code for the interaction between ghosts and the Pac-Man:

1. Pac-Man eats a ghost after he gobbles a magic dot.
2. A ghost eats the Pac-Man when it touches him.

We are now ready to create the ghosts in our game. The four ghosts, namely Blinky(red), Pinky(pink), Inky(cyan) and Clyde(orange), are trapped inside a cage when a game starts. After some time, they get out of the cage one by one and start roaming the maze. Their goal is to catch the Pac-Man. The Pac-Man dies if he is touched by one of the ghosts. If the Pac-Man swallows a magic dot, he has the power to eat ghosts for a while. During this time, the ghosts turn hollow and move more slowly.

In last article, we designed a data model and drew a maze with dots spread into the maze. Now we are ready to create the Pac-Man character. The Pac-Man character is controlled by the game player to move around the maze. While he is moving, he keeps gobbling dots along the path. To implement the Pac-Man character, we divide the coding into a few tasks so that we can create it bit by bit:

When I was young I was fascinated by arcade games. One of my favorites was the Pac-Man game.  Recently, when I was learning the JavaFX language, I decided to write the game in JavaFX.  Based on my experience in other programming languages, I assumed there would be some amount of work in building a game such as Pac-Man, giving me a good feel for RIA development in JavaFX.

From the results of this poll it appears that the acquisition of Sun by Oracle will not effect your choice of any of Sun's open source projects. Only 20% of those responding said they would be less likely to use...

This is the first in a series of several articles that explore some of the new features in Apache Pivot 1.1. Pivot is a Java-based RIA toolkit that is currently undergoing incubation at the Apache Software Foundation. This article discusses Pivot's support for drag and drop.

As I have previously reported, lots of Java programmers are adopting Flex. One question that Java programmers always ask is "where are my beloved collections classes?" First, the good news: this blog will point you to some excellent collection classes,...

I needed to estimate the effort required to port a Spring Rich Client application to AIR. Spring RCP applications are actually Java Swing applications. The project had 93 Java files, consisting of 118 Java classes and 16,950 total lines of...

Portal servers are popular for enterprises, because they provide a mechanism to aggregate multiple web-based applications, including news feeds and content management. The applications running in portals are called portlets, and they are specified by JSR 168 and Web Services...

Are Java developers going to ignore JavaFX in favor of Flex?

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.

Jordan Snyder turned more than a few heads at 360Flex when she demoed a lego Mindstorm robot controlled through an AIR interface. Adam Flater took some videos of the 'bot (since named "Nathan") cruising around the eBay campus. Cool stuff, to say the least. Videos of the bot and some more info on this project in the full entry.

Qt is a powerful and surprisingly pervasive fit client technology that could become the next RIA solution for C++ programmers.

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.