O’Reilly: Inside RIA

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.

In this episode I get an overview of the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI ) from Nate Koechley. We cover topics including how Nate got started there, the various elements in YUI, why Yahoo builds and maintains this library. We also touched on some of the more unique elements of Yahoo's offering for JavaScript developers including their integration with Flash, the Yahoo Pattern Library and how Yahoo plans to get more open source with their code.

Little more than a two years ago YAHOO! decided to make its library of cross-browser JavaScript components available to the public with a BSD license as the YUI, the YAHOO! User Interface library. It is now reaching the end of its second major version with dozens of minor versions, each new one bringing a few more components with it.

If you haven't yet heard of or installed the demo of Yahoo! BrowserPlus sneak peek, prepared to be both amazed and a little scared at the same time.

Web map has become an important utility of our daily life. We use it to plan a trip for directions, we use it to virtually walk around a city in 3D, we use it to find an apartment or a house from map mashup applications and so on. What if we want to ask more complicate questions to the web map, questions such as "How many Starbucks stores within 5 miles range of a dream house I can't take my eyes off, and I can drive to some of those stores in 3 minutes from the dream house?" Obviously for questions like this, merely putting markers/push-pins on the map is not enough.