O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Joshua Davis and Branden Hall joined us to talk about their latest ActionScript Library/Framework/Ideas called HYPE. We were also joined by Liz Fredrick, Kevin Schmidt, Zach Stepek, and Leif Wells. Listen to this week's podcast (m4a or mp3). You...

I have been developing Adobe Flex-based RIA applications for nearly three years. My prominent need has been for capable RIA photo galleries. I observed over time that most Flex-based example photo galleries resourced photos—either locally or remotely—from photo files stashed...

Shaun Smith and Joel Hooks of robotlegs fame joined us to discuss the creation of the project, explain its strengths, and to mention the best way to get started working with it. We were also joined by Leif Wells...

"How can you answer a question that is easy to answer now, but that may never be asked?" -- James Noble, Arguments and Results "anon funcs rarely good practice" -- someone on Twitter In an earlier post at nodename.com...

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. In this AFT I will go over - SourceMate. SourceMate is a new plugin...

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. In this AFT I will go over - Using IntelliJ Idea 9 For Flash...

When I transitioned from artist to developer, once I learned Flash I didn't go any further. Sure I know PHP, Ruby, JavaScript and a few other languages but not as well as I know ActionScript. Where am I going with this? Well, when I was an artist I picked the right tool for the job, but as a programmer I locked myself into one language and made that my focus. In 2010 my New Year resolution and life goal is to become a Renaissance Developer just like I was as an artist. Here, in no particular order is my list of the languages I want to learn in 2010: Silverlight, Unity, HaXe, Object C. I would love to hear your thoughts and if you want to also become a Renaissance Developer?

Type casting and type checking have always been central to any computer programming language, especially in Object Oriented languages like Actionscript. In fact, knowing what type of object you are receiving as a parameter or the ability to "transform" your...

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. In this AFT I will go over - As3 Design Patterns On The iPhone....

In this article we're going to cover an exciting, and increasingly popular way to deliver an amazing user experience, video. Few mediums can grab one's attention quicker than video. Let's face it, people on the Internet have almost no attention span -- we've even reduced our conversations to 140 character chunks -- so the faster you can grab and engage the user the better.

Pretty much every developer encounters situations where she needs to deal with a group of objects in a similar manner. Whether that's a set of movie clips for a game, a set of questions in a survey, or a set...

I came back from RIAdventure all stoked with new ideas to research and nail down in my own mind. One of the ideas I thought I heard there was the thought that you could probably improve performance by using Object...

This past weekend I assisted my director at my university with a project he was working on for the president of the school. It was a fun project, and the time line was essentially by the end of the weekend...

Wikipedia defines Lazy Loading as "a design pattern commonly used in computer programming to defer initialization of an object until the point at which it is needed." Typically, we do this to make an RIA application more responsive–since we're not...

A large part of any ActionScript project is code dedicated to testing and debugging. These parts of your application may be needed while in development, but usually not needed within a production environment. You might think that making a release build will take care of everything. Really, this only takes out the internal debugger code but not any of the traces or code that you might of defined while creating your project. The only way to strip this code out of your code base is with conditional compiling.

In a previous article I outlined why I needed to inject JavaScript into a page from ActionScript, now I'd like to show the implementation. Essentially I created a new class called JSInjector. Within JSInjector I created a static function...

Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of Control (IoC) are design patterns that have been receiving a lot of attention recently in the ActionScript 3 framework community. These patterns provide a solid basis for creating loosely coupled, testable code. This article...

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 - describeType.

Recently, I decided to get my hands dirty with the latest build of Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4. The new IDE has a lot of really exciting new features that will save developers a lot of time. The features that excite me the most are the new Spark components and skinning capabilities in the new SDK. Towards the beginning of the year I had read through the first few drafts of the new Spark component architecture, the style changes and how easy it is to skin components. Lots of things have changed since then, so I decided to refresh my memory and build a simple component to test my knowledge. Behold the SortableList component.

In some of my recent articles I detailed the architecture and some implementation of a video player swapper - that is a video player that can play different kinds of videos, assuming that the videos required specific unique players. After...