O’Reilly: Inside RIA

At the Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco, Adobe passed out DVD’s of both Flash Catalyst (code name Thermo) and Flex Builder 4 (code name Gumbo). These products together hope to bridge the gap between designers and developers, by giving designers the ability to control the look of the application and then handing off a project ready to be coded by a developer. This tutorial has been created with the version of Flash Catalyst that was distributed during the MAX conference last November. Since this is an early build of the software some features may change and others added before the final release.

Good news, Adobe has started to post the videos of the MAX presentations from San Francisco last month. They have about a dozen posted so far with a promise of many more to come. Check them out on Adobe TV.

If you bought CS3, you might recall an extra CD of online video tutorials presented in an application called the Adobe Video Workshop. The application was built in Flex with all of the content graciously provided by the good folks at Lynda.com. Adobe reports now through the User Interface Resource Center that the online version of Adobe Video Workshop has facilitated over 5 million training sessions. That's a big number. Even without the disk-based users, that's a wildly successful application.

The promise of JavaScript/CSS libraries like the free, BSD-licensed Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is that they make it easier to create rich interfaces in the browser. In this article, we'll explore the creation of a simple web app using YUI and look closely at the YUI paradigm.

This excerpt is the second part of Chapter 8 of the upcoming (March 17, 2008 - NOW SHIPPING) book titled Beginning AIR: Building Applications for the Adobe Integrated Runtime ISBN: 0470229047. Beginning AIR is written in a walk through style where the examples are built upon throughout each section of the book. The easiest way to learn how to use the API's covered is to create the examples and follow along as they are built upon. This excerpt covers the differences between asynchronous and synchronous calls to the File classes methods. It will also show how to create temporary directories and files.

This excerpt is the second part of Chapter 8 of the upcoming (March 17, 2008 - NOW SHIPPING) book titled Beginning AIR: Building Applications for the Adobe Integrated Runtime ISBN: 0470229047. Beginning AIR is written in a walk through style where the examples are built upon throughout each section of the book. The easiest way to learn how to use the API's covered is to create the examples and follow along as they are built upon. This excerpt covers how to use the File class to create, move, copy, and delete files. It will also demonstrate the usage of the FileStream class for working with the contents of individual files.

This excerpt is the first part of Chapter 8 of the upcoming (March 17, 2008) book titled Beginning AIR: Building Applications for the Adobe Integrated Runtime ISBN: 0470229047. Beginning AIR is written in a walk through style where the examples are built upon throughout each section of the book. The easiest way to learn how to use the API's covered is to create the examples and follow along as they are built upon. This excerpt covers how to create, move, copy, delete, and list the contents of directories on the operating system's file system.

Papervision3D opens a whole new dimension to World Wide Web. The third dimension! Thanks to a core group of ActionScript geniuses who understand mathematical representations of 3D space way better than you or me, we can now easily add a new perspective to our Flash applications. This article will cover what’s necessary to set up your first Papervision3D application as well as introduce you to adding 3D objects. Put on your 3-dimensional hat and let’s get started!

AIR applications can be built with Flex, Flash, or HTML / JavaScript, but an AIR application goes beyond these technologies. What sets an AIR application apart? AIR applications have access to so many native elements of the operating system including the local filesystem, the clipboard, the command line, and native data encryption. AIR also integrates local database functionality and service monitoring to create powerful online and offline applications. In addition, AIR applications can leverage a powerful update mechanism and browser-based installation. AIR applications also add an additional level of control to HTML content and PDF documents. This is what sets AIR applications apart form the technologies that are used to develop them. This is the AIR API.