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.

Kind of old news (only a week), but Adobe recently released a beta version of LCDS 3.0 on Adobe Labs. Read on to get more information about LCDS 3.0...

Here's a quick tip for working with real time data in Flex applications (in particular Blaze Data Services and LiveCycle Data Services). LCDS isn't new by any means, but not everyone uses it on a daily basis. Here are a few ways that you can push real-time data between the server and client applications.

If you have ever worked with LiveCycle Data Services or BlazeDS in a data-broadcast (data-push) scenario, there's no doubt know about using Consumer objects to receive streams of data. When messages are received, MessageEvent.MESSAGE events are dispatched, and your application can respond to the incoming data as it is received.

Adobe has released a white paper on LCDS capacity planning, based on benchmarks by Adobe engineering. If you have to estimate server load or data throughput for LCDS-based real-time messaging systems, you'll find this extremely helpful in planning your architecture.

With LiveCycle Data Services ES 2.6 ("LCDS"), Adobe has added native caching for AIR and the Flash Player. This is an amazing advancement due to the small amount of code required to complete offline synchronization compared to a custom solution. The goal of this article is to provide a start to finish guide to building an AIR application with offline data synchronization from LCDS. I am a tactile learner and I like to write and present this way so instead of chatting...let's code!

Flex Based Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) by definition typically require server access to provide the information resources and repository. When jumping into the server side topics, are you confused and overwhelmed by the choice of server platforms, networking protocols, and messaging formats such as REST (XML), SOAP, and Adobe’s AMF? In this article I work to alleviate those fears and confusions about remote servers and messaging with the Flex client. This article provides a review of these alternatives along with an analysis of example remote messaging code utilizing the AMF 3 protocol.

Today, Adobe released the public beta version of LCDS 2.6 on labs. I see this as a pretty big release because we now have highly scalable streaming data available over port 80 using the HTTP protocol.

In the last installment of our Development Series Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA, we looked at how we organized our project and described it with Maven. Now we'll continue looking at the project's structure, with an in-depth look at the three child projects for the purpose of learning more about project dependencies. Check it out!

In the last installment of our Development Series Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA, we looked at the sample code that uses the tools discussed in this series. Now we're going to have a look at J2EE project structures and how Maven, a build process and code process management tool, works with them.

In the last installment of our Development Series Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA, we looked at the tools we'll be discussing in this series. Now we're going to look at the sample code that uses those tools as a way to show Flex working in an enterprise setting. Ready to dig in? We've got sample code and full specs...

In this series, we’ll look at a small application that integrates the technologies of LCDS and EJB 3.0, and we’ll cover some timesaving tools as well as discuss how to use them to achieve a lightweight development environment for integrating an RIA with an enterprise environment. Ready to get started? First, a look at the tools a developer needs to follow along at home…