O’Reilly: Inside RIA

When building Flex applications, it is important to understand how to get data into and out of your applications and remote procedure calls (rpc). In this post, I'll try to shed some light on HTTPService, WebService, and RemoteObject classes and their usage.

I had my first encounter with web services about two years ago. I was contracting at the time, and Adobe had just announced the end of development of the software where I had most of my reputation, Authorware. I needed to retool my skills to Adobe Flex, and I needed to convey to potential clients what kind of skills they could expect as I was retooling. I decided I wanted my company website to reflect the bleeding edge of what I was doing. But I was also devoting a lot of time to blogging and participating in online newsgroups to try to spread the word, and I just didn't have time to manually update my site as often as I felt I needed to.

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.

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.

For this post, I decided to change things up a bit. Rather than go explore complex application patterns or data visualization, we're going back to basics. We will be covering how to make a basic application that makes a call to a web service and retrieves data.

Silverlight can talk to a number of types of web services using REST or SOAP, returning JSON or XML, or even communicating with RSS feeds. Its important to evaluate the type of service you need before developing it.

Parsing XML from SIlverlight is a whole lot easier with LINQ to XML.