O’Reilly: Inside RIA

This video excerpt is from Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend Course 2. In Course 2 of this unique DVD training series, you'll learn intermediate to advanced ActionScript 3.0 programming concepts. World-renowned ActionScript guru and educator Colin Moock presents...

We're going to keep this post lean and mean, and get down to business with 10 Tips that will keep your Flex applications fast, lean, and responsive. The tips are focused around three best practices rules. Rule # 1: Clean up after yourself -- In general, it is good practice to maintain clean code. Not only in the sense of having properly formatted and readable code, but also code that leaves nothing behind... no memory leaks, no cpu hogs, nothing but a clean object that can be reclaimed by the GC.

A homework assignment I was recently given for a Java programming class involved a competition to see who could create the most optimized implementation of an interface which was provided by the instructor. It was a challenging and very fun assignment that I think the whole class enjoyed. I didn’t win the competition but still came out a winner because of my heightened interest in application optimization and performance tuning that I gained.

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,...

The complexity hidden by JavaScript frameworks ... and the "cool" factor can hide inefficient programming.

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.

Earlier today, Richard Monson-Haefel posted here on insideria.com about the "One Million Record Challenge". I thought this was a pretty interesting test for any RIA platform, although it will yield wildly different results on different machines, and can't necessarily be used as a true benchmark. I decided to take on this challenge with Flex.

SAP's Web Dynpro can easily handle loading 1 million records into a visual table and sorting them - so too can Curl. Can your RIA platform of choice handle 1 million rows in a table?

Overview When building a Flex application, you need to consider the objects you display and how they interact with the end user, the Flash Player, and even the Flex Framework itself. Performance is all about doing things in the least...

Overview When you think about writing efficient code, the first couple things that come to mind are speed and memory footprint. Although keeping your applications responsive and quick while maintaining a reasonably small memory footprint is definitely a key consideration...

Steve Souders the creator of YSlow has now released Cuzillion which is essentially a page load simulation tool. Very cool for figuring the best way to structure your and in which order to load assets.

Overview   As Flex developers we strive to create user experiences that are engaging and efficient.  The mandate of this mantra requires us to take startup times into account.  When we build our applications, the last thing that we...

Here's a quick tip to help you squeeze extra performance out of your Flex/ActionScript applications when looping over and crunching lots of data on the client side. Use the dictionary class or associative arrays when you can!

First of all, let me start off by saying that this is NOT another blog article in the great RIA platform debate. While I am an AJAX developer, and have been for several years now, the point of this article is not to take sides and convince you that AJAX is the best RIA tool available. Because AJAX isn't. Except when it is. You see, tools have uses, and to say that any one platform is in all ways superior is, I think, overstating things. A lot. Yes, I'm a bit biased, but not so much so that I feel the need to convince people that AJAX has no flaws. Flex and Silverlight have strengths that lay against weaknesses in AJAX, and vice versa. The question isn't “Which platform is best”, but “Which platform best fits my needs”.

Everyone wants their Flex application to perform well. We each want ours to be fast, with minimal wait times, and want it to run as seamlessly as possible. Well, one of the most important factors in getting this kind of response is the structure of your data model, and the results of your data services.

Now that you've had a chance to get your feet wet with Adam and Scott's outstanding InsideRIA series on Learning Flex From Scratch (LFFS) it's time to start really thinking about optimizing your apps. Many new developer are just happy to build an application that works without thinking of the consequences of poor architecture, inefficient code, and over-zealous eye candy. Although you may be fine for a while, eventually a lack of concern for performance is going to stop you in your tracks. Thanks to Murphy's law, this inevitability will occur most often on very large or important projects, and oftentimes after they're two days away from launch.

The responsiveness and performance of a Flex application directly relates to what is being displayed onscreen. The more that is happening, the slower the application will respond. In most cases, you won't run into this scenario. If you are dynamically adding LOTS of UIComponents, then this tip will help you create applications that perform very well under heavy load.

Need to check how small you can compress your JavaScript code with various common compression utilities such as Gzip, JSmin, Dojo Skrinksafe, Packer and YUI Compressor? To avoid having to download and install all the various tools you can use CompressorRater to quickly determine which compression technique will be best for your code.