O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Yep, thats right... Google has released a Flash/AS3 API for Google Maps, and yes, it works with Flex. I'm very glad to see the Google Maps team take this step, and provide a supported API for their maps interface.

Ryan Stewart just sent me some information on compiling for the Flashplayer 10 in Flex. You can read the full report here on Adobe's open source site. It involves getting the latest nightly build of Flex 3 and updating your compiler to use the new PlayerGlobal.swc - not too difficult.

The next 360|Flex is scheduled for August 18-20, 2008. They now have the final scheduled posted and are taking registrations. The 360|Flex conferences are always excellent and have top notch speakers. Just visit the 360|Flex site to see the schedule and register.

It's official folks - Flash Player 10 was announced about 4 minutes ago and is in Beta up on Adobe Labs. New features include native CPU and GPU acceleration for better performance, better graphics, native support for 3d, and much more. Read this entry to find a full list of new features and links to all the official release info.

Flash Player 10 public beta is now publicly available for download. This next generation player has added some outstanding new features. Many of these new features were first demonstrated at MAX 2007 in Chicago last year. If you didn't see these demos, here is a quick recap of these new features.

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.

We've already seen how to automate the Java unit tests with TestNG, and in this week’s installment of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA we're going to automate our Flex tests with Flex Unit and Maven/Ant. Join us Mondays as we finish up our series, Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA.

One of the most important aspects of delivering a rich user experience is what a user sees and interacts with on the screen. Graphics, whether static or dynamic, comprise the face of an application. Static graphics can definitely suffice for creating the necessary visual parts of an application, but to change them you must replace them with other static graphics. Dynamic graphics, created with programmatic drawing are very powerful because it can be manipulated at run-time, but it can involve more advanced knowledge of the Drawing API. Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework that aims to offer the best of both worlds.