O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. Each AFT is designed to be quickly digested, usually only taking a few minutes to get up and running, and contains valuable information you can directly apply to your next Flash campaign. In this AFT I will go over - Dynamically Creating Classes From XML.

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:

Lots of RIA's use web services, and one of the more tedious parts of writing a service can be looping through all of the rows in a recordset, adding nodes, setting their attributes, etc. I spend a lot of time trawling...

Flash has an undeserved bad wrap in the Search Engine Optimization world. Some SEO experts even warn not to use Flash, because many search engines have trouble indexing Flash content. While Flash content is searchable by Google, it's critical to use Flash wisely if you want your applications to be searchable by all search engines.

Here's a quick tip when working with XML in Flex. E4X is great in most scenarios, it allows you to easily traverse and filter XML-based data structures, and in most cases it is your friend. However, one area where E4X struggles is if you have an XML structure where a node name contains a dash "-" character. Here's how you can get around that issue.

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

Cloud Gazing from Silverlight 2 ... SOAP, REST, POX and more all from Silverlight 2.

Which RPC protocol is the best: XML over HTTP, JSON, or AMF. It depends on the context and the platform

Here's a quick tip for anyone developing AIR applications. You may often find scenarios where you need to display metadata about your application inside the application itself, from the application descriptor xml file. This tip will show you exactly how to access application descriptor information.

Normally, when working client-side within a web application and there's a need for data exchange, it feels very natural to use JSON as a data exchange format. It's easy to take a string from the server, convert it into a JavaScript object and then access what we need out of it. But maybe there's a better way.